The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (45 page)

It was a strange inconclusive finale to the greatest crisis of late-Victorian imperialism. But it was also a sign that the British connection was bound to depend on the scale and vigour of its local bridgehead. For much of the nineteenth century, the undecided struggle between whites and blacks for the South African interior had given significant leverage to the Imperial Factor and strengthened its grip on the coastal colonies. After the setback of 1881, the expanding influence of the Anglo-commercial elite had been the best hope of keeping the whole sub-continent within the British orbit. In 1898, Rhodes and Milner had fallen back on race loyalty and Britannic nationalism. After 1902, Milner had hoped to build his British South Africa on the surer foundation of a British majority. By 1908, even his staunchest friend among the South African English, Percy Fitzpatrick, acknowledged that, in the short term at least, there was no choice but to work with the ‘moderate’ Boers, Botha and Smuts, to prevent the revival of full-blooded republicanism – a view shared by Jameson. It is tempting to conclude that British blood and treasure had been spent in vain: that Britain's hold on South Africa was more dependent than ever upon Afrikaner goodwill. That would be mistaken.

In fact, Botha and Smuts understood how limited and conditional was their tenure of power. In theory, they could disavow their allegiance to the Imperial crown and secede from the Empire. In practice, loyalty was the only option. This was not because rebellion would be punished by a British invasion – though imperial intervention could not be ruled out. Nor because it would freeze the mineral economy with its close ties to London – though financial disruption would have followed. The real check on republican nationalism was more brutal. What Botha and Smuts feared most of all was a return to the ‘racial politics’ of 1899, and an English party united against them under Randlord leadership, under the banner of ‘the Empire in danger’. If that were to happen, then ‘Krugerism’ would also revive: and
their
centre would not hold. They could hardly doubt the results of repudiating the British connection: at best the break-up of the Union; at worst a civil war, pitting loyalist veterans against Boer commandos. This was the real legacy of the South African War: not the failure of Milner or the breaking of Kruger, but the entrenchment of the South African English, forged by the war and its prelude into a self-conscious ‘Britannic’ community within a brittle, gimcrack, settler state. Divided as they were by class and region and personal antagonisms, they were strong enough to exclude Afrikaner republicanism from practical politics. It was not what Milner and Rhodes had intended; but it proved curiously durable all the same.

7 THE EDWARDIAN TRANSITION

The last long decade before the outbreak of the First World War was a proving ground. It tested the extent to which the British had been able to adapt their superstructure of power and influence to the more strenuous global conditions that set in during the 1880s and 1890s and reached a further peak of intensity after 1900. The judgment of historians has been variable. The Edwardian decade has sometimes been seen as the ‘high noon’ of empire, the last hurrah of a self-confident imperialism. But, usually, the view has been sterner. Indeed, the more closely the Edwardians have been scrutinised, the more they seem prone to well-merited anxieties. Far from delivering a new security, their abandonment of ‘splendid isolation’ brought the uncertain liabilities of the Triple Entente and an uneasy dependence on Japan in East Asia. The cost of defending their naval supremacy was a furious arms race with Germany, and ended in a strategic withdrawal from the Mediterranean Sea. The Edwardian economy lost ground on productivity, and real incomes stagnated – one cause of large-scale industrial unrest in the last years of peace. The scale of mass poverty revealed by contemporary inquiry was an indictment of both ‘national efficiency’ and social justice. Domestic stability was threatened by fierce divisions over tariffs, taxation and the constitution. The revival of the Irish Question after 1910 highlighted the failure of parliamentary government to resolve the future of Ulster and raised the spectre of civil war in the British Isles.

On this view, it is easy to see why the last years before the First World War are often contrasted unfavourably with the mid-Victorian era. Late-Victorian Britain was a ‘declining hegemon’; Edwardian Britain a ‘weary titan’. But the reasoning here is faulty. Britain's ‘hegemonic’ status in the mid-nineteenth century is often invoked but rarely described. It is a plausible myth. British power in mid-century had little purchase over much of continental Europe where allies were vital to intervention or leverage. Much of the non-European world lay beyond the reach of either the Royal Navy or the Indian Army. The sphere of mid-Victorian Britain's economic primacy was wide (though far from global) but it was also shallow – since much of it was barely exploited. The late Victorians’ empire was richer as well as bigger. Too much can be made of their ‘relative decline’, especially when the measures for it are vague. Too little has been made of the rising wealth of the Edwardians’ empire and the growing mass of assets they were piling up abroad. Indeed, for Edwardian Britain, the real question was not the retention or loss of a nebulous ‘hegemony’, but whether, as the British system expanded in a more intensely competitive world, its parts could be made to cohere.

Imperial grand strategy and the South African War

Before 1899, the grand strategy of empire had seemed obvious. British foreign policy was the policy of a sea-power,
the
sea-power. The Royal Navy was assumed to be capable of defeating any naval force that challenged it in a general war. Command of the sea would be secured by a decisive victory and the destruction of the enemy fleet – as had happened at Trafalgar. Thereafter, the great archipelago of British interests and possessions spread across the globe would be invulnerable to invasion – with the signal exceptions of India and Canada. British sea-power would apply the brutal tourniquet of blockade to bring the enemy to terms. The Navy was thus the great defensive and offensive weapon of British world power. By contrast, the functions of the Army were of almost secondary importance. It existed to support the civil power at home, not least in Ireland; to supply men for the large contingent maintained in India; to garrison the bases and coaling stations scattered round the world; to provide for home defence in the unlikely event of an invasion undetected by the Navy; and to supply, if need be, an expeditionary force of up to 70,000 men for service overseas.
¹
In the Stanhope memorandum of 1891 that set out the Army's role in this order, the likelihood of such an expeditionary force being sent to Europe was treated as of almost fantastic improbability.

These strategic preconceptions dictated the distribution of British forces around the world and influenced their formations and tactics. The Navy was deployed on nine stations, each embracing a vast area of sea. On the Home Station were eighteen battleships and sixteen cruisers as well as a mass of smaller craft: this was the front line against invasion and the reserve against emergency elsewhere. In the Mediterranean, where the British had the greatest reason to fear a combined assault by France and Russia and much to lose, they kept a large force of twelve battleships and thirteen cruisers in a fleet of more than forty ships. On other stations, with the exception of China, they relied upon cruisers to maintain their seaborne primacy: ten in the Western Atlantic (the North America and West Indies station), two off the east coast of South America; four in the Eastern Pacific; seven to patrol the Cape of Good Hope and the West African coast; four on the East Indies station; and eight on the Australian.
²
On extra-European stations, the most visible sign of British sea-power was often the gunboat, a small, lightly armed ship of some 600 tons with a crew of between 60 and 100.
³
But the workhorse of British sea-power beyond European waters was the faster, well-armed, long-range cruiser, patrolling the sea-lanes and paying the courtesy calls that served as a none too subtle reminder that coastal states without navies and who depended upon the revenues from trade were wise to avoid the sea-power's displeasure.

By contrast with the Navy, the Army was somewhat more heavily concentrated. On the eve of the South African War it disposed of 31 cavalry regiments and 142 infantry battalions grouped in pairs to form the county regiments created by the Cardwell reforms.
⁴
The infantry battalions were maids-of-all-work. In 1896, eighteen were scattered in pockets around the world from Bermuda to Hong Kong, three were in Egypt, three in South Africa, and fifty-two were in India. The remainder were at home, not so much as a striking force as a reservoir from which the overseas units were filled up. Indeed, it was easy to imagine that the Army at home existed chiefly to service the great garrison kept in India since the Mutiny: this was the manpower problem that obsessed its chiefs. Where the Army had seen action since the Crimean War it had fought small wars with small formations against Asian or African foes, usually lacking modern weapons.
⁵
On colonial battlefields, individual resource and the brute courage of a professional army substituted for the staff skills and modern tactics prized by continental generals. Against an uncivilised foe military doctrine was straightforward. ‘Dash at the first fellows that make their appearance’, said Wellington, the greatest of the ‘sepoy generals’, ‘and the campaign will be ours.’
⁶

Of course, the late-Victorian system had been far from perfect. The generals fretted constantly over the shortage of manpower. ‘We live from hand to mouth, like the insolvent debtor who meets his daily liabilities by shifts invented on the spur of the moment’, complained Lord Wolseley in 1896. ‘Is this a real military system, or is it a system of make-believe?’
⁷
The demand for more battleships on overseas stations rose inexorably: in the Mediterranean after the Franco-Russian alliance, and also in China. To cover the gaps, it had sometimes been necessary to make guarded promises of joint defensive action, as Salisbury had done with the Mediterranean agreements of 1887. Such precautions were needed, he told Queen Victoria, against the danger of the continental powers treating ‘the English Empire as divisible booty by which their differences might be adjusted’.
⁸
But it was the South African War that was cause and occasion for the most drastic review of grand strategy since the 1860s.

There were several reasons for this. The defeats of ‘Black Week’ in December 1899 shattered any remaining complacency about the likely performance of the Army in a war against a first-class opponent. The humiliation of military failure bred a mood of recrimination that surfaced during the war and afterwards at the Elgin Commission's enquiry into its conduct. ‘For frank, not to say malicious criticism of one another’, remarked Milner sardonically in January 1900, ‘I know of no set of men equal to our
haute armée.
’
⁹
To the Royal Commission, Kitchener and other senior officers presented a catalogue of defects: the poverty of intelligence; the shortage of staff skills; the age and infirmity of battalion commanders; the absence of professionalism among officers; above all the lack of any means to control the movements of an army far larger than the usual colonial expedition. One regimental adjutant had been reduced to advertising in a Cape Town newspaper for information on the whereabouts of his unit.
¹⁰
‘Regarded as an institution or society’, remarked Leopold Amery crushingly in
The Times History of the War in South Africa
, ‘the British army of 1899 was undoubtedly a success…As a fighting machine it was largely a sham.’
¹¹
During the war, the concentration of so much military manpower in South Africa made the defence of India (the first object of imperial grand strategy) look increasingly precarious. With Russia's military frontier grinding towards the Himalayas, the Indian Viceroy Lord Curzon insisted that in the event of war 70,000 men would have to be sent immediately to India – a calculation the War Office was forced to accept in 1901.
¹²
Even if the men were available, South African experience was bound to raise doubts about the Army's ability to face an Armageddon in the Hindu Kush.

But it was sea-power not the defence of India that touched the rawest nerve and galvanised the British cabinet. When Lord Selborne became First Lord of the Admiralty in November 1900, he quickly sounded the alarm to his colleagues.
¹³
Britain faced a revival of French sea-power in the Mediterranean, making Admiral Fisher's call for more battleships there irresistible. Simultaneously, the Boxer Rebellion in China and the intervention by the Western Powers and Japan made the risk of a forced partition far greater, and with it the chance of conflict between the Powers. Britain had to match the rapid growth of Russia's eastern sea strength. ‘We could not afford’, wrote Selborne urgently, ‘to see our Chinese trade disappear, or to see Hong Kong and Singapore fall, particularly not at a moment when a military struggle with Russia might be in progress on the confines of India.’
¹⁴
For Selborne, the emergency in East Asia on top of his Mediterranean difficulties was the last straw. A new course was essential. The cabinet toyed uneasily with a scheme to ally with Germany, but flinched at the prospect of military commitments in Europe. All the while, fear of Russia, that power to whom ‘defeat, diplomatic, naval or military matters less…than to any other power’,
¹⁵
grew steadily stronger. ‘A quarrel with Russia anywhere, about anything, means the invasion of India’, groaned Balfour, Salisbury's nephew and heir-apparent, in December 1901.
¹⁶
Without allies, Britain would be fair game if France joined in. The short-term solution was a naval alliance with Japan in East Asia, concluded not without misgivings in January 1902. The end of the South African War in May 1902 did nothing to ease the naval strain. ‘We must have a force which is reasonably calculated to beat France and Russia’, wrote Selborne in January 1903, ‘and we must have something in hand against Germany.’
¹⁷
Meanwhile, London struggled inconclusively with army reform to provide its share of the huge force of three or four hundred thousand men that Kitchener (now Commander-in-Chief in India) declared essential to repel an invasion brought closer by Russia's new strategic railways in Central Asia.
¹⁸
But the government's real decision was to endorse Selborne's demand for a large rise in naval spending (50 per cent greater by 1905 than in 1899) and the revolution in naval deployment that Fisher had planned.