The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (60 page)

In Canada, Australia and New Zealand, ethnic majorities of British descent, urged on by a London-looking press, their Protestant clergies and the loyalism of recent immigrants, responded to the call of the Empire in danger. In all three dominions, the political elite insisted that the survival and solidarity of the Empire was a vital national interest, and that their future as ‘British nations’ (the only national future then imaginable) depended upon the fullest possible commitment to the imperial enterprise. But, in South Africa, India and Ireland, the politics of imperial war were very different. South Africa was a dominion too, but a dominion with a difference. Among whites, to whom political power was all but completely reserved, Dutch-speaking Afrikaners formed a clear majority. While the ‘English’ reacted to the outbreak of war with martial ardour – ‘Johannesburg is full of patriotic emotion’, reported the Unionist politician, Patrick Duncan
¹¹⁸
– Afrikaner feelings were much more ambivalent. There was little sense of obligation to the imperial power whose conquest of the Boer republics was such a recent and painful memory. Among those Afrikaners in whom the republican faith still burned fiercely, the old adage ‘England's danger, Ireland's opportunity’ bore an obvious South African meaning. The prime minister, Louis Botha, faced a dilemma. He was acutely sensitive to the charge of dividing the Afrikaner
volk
. But he was also aware that refusal to contribute to the war would enrage the South African English and expose him to the full force of London's displeasure. ‘Racial’ conflict between Afrikaners and English was likely to arise whether he participated too much or too little. Shrewdly, Botha sought a middle course. At London's request, he mounted a campaign to capture German South West Africa (modern Namibia). It was an obvious target and one that might have been expected to appeal to Afrikaner feeling as much as English. But politically it was a disaster. To many Afrikaners, the attack on Germany's colony was unjustified, and also counter-productive: it destroyed their best lever against the imperious British. Two of Botha's most senior commanders, and a number of commandos – the militia units that embodied Boer society at the local level – rejected the order to serve and rose in revolt. Perhaps 11,000 rebels took up arms against the government. From October 1914 until January 1915, the issue hung in the balance. ‘People in Johannesburg do not realise how critical the situation in the country is’, said Duncan, ‘and how much depends on Botha's being able to keep his people in hand.’
¹¹⁹
Without Botha, ‘anything might happen’.
¹²⁰

Botha's personal authority among Afrikaners and the loyalty he enjoyed from the majority of commandos enabled him to bring the revolt to an end. But bitterness and republican sympathy remained strong, especially in the countryside. Even in the towns, young Afrikaners were ‘very disaffected’. ‘The Empire means nothing to them or inspires them with revulsion.’
¹²¹
For the English politicians, fear of another revolt and dependence upon Botha to prevent it happening, were deeply frustrating.
¹²²
They were furious at the terms on which South Africa's contribution to the larger war was made. In August 1915, Botha arranged for a volunteer contingent of brigade strength to be raised for overseas service. (In all, over 70,000 whites, overwhelmingly drawn from the English community, and 44,000 blacks served in Europe.
¹²³
) But he insisted that they be paid for by London and incorporated in the British army – a decision which meant that their pay at ‘imperial’ rates was one-third of the ‘Union’ pay received by those who fought in South West Africa or by the (mainly Afrikaner) contingent that fought under Smuts in German East Africa. The Unionist party leaders raged privately at Botha's refusal to bring his South African party into a ‘loyal’ coalition to fight the war. But they dared not attack him openly, despite the strong feeling among their supporters, for fear he would resign or drift into alliance with the covert republicans in the National party.

Indeed, Botha became more not less indispensable the longer the war went on. Military failure in Europe and the Near East, the stimulus of the Dublin rising, and agrarian discontent among rural Afrikaners, helped to revive the republican cause in the second half of the war. In 1918, controversy over the Union government's payments to London (to meet some of the costs of the South African contingent), rumours that conscription would be introduced to meet the manpower crisis on the Western Front and mounting labour unrest (among whites and blacks) as shortage and inflation took their toll, heightened the political tension. Nationalists talked openly of demanding ‘complete independence’ (code for a republic) when the war ended. In January 1919, they agreed on a delegation to Paris to reverse the verdict of 1902 and restore republican status to the Transvaal and Orange Free State. English politicians looked on fearfully. ‘The war…has opened up much of the old racial consciousness’, said Duncan gloomily. ‘It has also accentuated the sense of dependence involved in the subordination of our South African politics to the exigencies of a desperate war.’
¹²⁴
But, if the Afrikaner majority united behind a republic and secession from the Empire, the result would be disastrous. ‘The English would fight’, and ‘it would be impossible for the British Government and the rest of the Empire to keep out of it.’ Something had to be done to appease the Afrikaner sense of racial subjection and build a real South African citizenship. If the Empire cannot provide adequately for South Africa in these respects, it will not keep South Africa as a member.’

In fact, the war had starkly revealed the peculiar terms on which South Africa was attached to the British system. Isolationism was a much more powerful factor there than in any of the other dominions. This was partly a matter of Afrikaner resistance to imperial ‘service’: the same feeling could be found in Quebec. But it sprang just as much from the unspoken fear that a holocaust of white men in a far-off war would imperil the physical base of white supremacy in a sub-continent where it was recent, hard-won and fragile. Though blacks had almost no political power, the
zwaartgevaar
(‘black danger’) was here, as in much else, the real governor of South African politics. For Unionist politicians, the war was a great disappointment. They had failed to force Botha into an Anglo-Afrikaner coalition avowedly ‘loyal’ to the imperial connection. Instead, the war had seemed to strengthen the old ‘Krugerist’ republican strand of Afrikaner nationalism. The English were divided by the politics of class. The standard-bearers of Britannic sentiment in South Africa resigned themselves to the role of an imperial garrison, ready to block the road to secession by whatever means. But, before the full impact of post-war unrest and instability could be felt, Botha died prematurely in August 1919.

India

In South Africa, the political compact of 1910 had been preserved by carefully limiting its contribution to the war. No such option existed for India. South Africa was a vital strategic outpost whose gold output was mobilised for London's war economy. But India was a main base, the second centre of British military power. Once the war spread to the Near and Middle East, India was expected to bear much of the burden: to counter the Turkish threat in the Persian Gulf (and to the British-controlled oilfield in Southwest Persia) and then to invade the Ottoman provinces of modern Iraq. In the dark days of 1918, when the ‘new war’ threatened imperial disaster, India was pressed even harder for men and resources to meet the shortfall elsewhere. All this was bound to be a source of heavy strain. India's modern infrastructure was only very partially developed. There was little reserve capacity for the sudden increase in the transport of persons and products. In an overwhelmingly agrarian economy, much of it near the margin of subsistence, there was little scope for the increase of revenue or for the vast domestic borrowing through which London had financed much of its war expenditure at home. Above all, a government in which all executive power was wielded by British officials faced the Himalayan task of winning Indian loyalty to an imperial war. If the war was to mean the recruitment (of volunteers), an increased burden of taxation, the economic hardships of inflation, shortage, bottlenecks, and the restriction of personal liberty, for what higher purpose were Indians being asked to make such sacrifice?

Symptoms of discontent were not lacking in India. Almost from the beginning of the war, the government in Delhi had been alarmed by the threat of armed conspiracy by Sikh militants based in the United States and the revival of terrorism in Bengal. But the war against the Ottoman Empire raised a much more worrying prospect. Many educated Muslims in India had been agitated before 1914 by the fear that Turkey as the largest independent Muslim state and guardian of the Holy Places in Mecca and Jerusalem was about to collapse. Defeat by Italy and the Balkan states in 1912–13 tolled the Turkish knell. Associations had been formed to express Muslim solidarity and send material help. Muslim politics in India became increasingly responsive to this sense of a wider Islamic identity. In May 1915, the government of India interned the most prominent of the younger and more radical Muslim politicians, the brothers Mohamed and Shaukat Ali, on the grounds that they had made contact with Turkish agents, were promoting pro-Turkish sympathies in their newspapers, and were active champions of ‘pan-Islamism’.
¹²⁵
The result was to pave the way for a much closer alignment between the leaders of the Muslim League and the Indian National Congress than had seemed possible before 1914. By early 1916, the Viceroy was becoming anxious to pre-empt the call for some political reward for Indian loyalty by a constitutional initiative of his own – though one that fell far short of the ‘colonial
swaraj
’ (dominion-style self-government) to which Congress was committed.
¹²⁶
The appearance of the ‘Home Rule Leagues’ in 1916 showed that open discontent was spreading among Hindus as well as Muslims. But, before New Delhi could extract a decision from its embattled masters in London, the Indian politicians pulled off a stunning coup. In December 1916, the Congress and the Muslim League reached agreement upon a set of constitutional demands whose studied moderation concealed a far-reaching challenge to British authority. Far from being the handiwork of ‘extremists’, it had been endorsed by the elected members of the Viceroy's legislative council – a group of unimpeachable respectability.

Delhi and London were now galvanised into activity. The Viceroy pressed not for the promise of a post-war declaration, but a declaration now. Without it, he warned, it would be difficult ‘to arrest the further defection of moderate opinion’ to the campaign for ‘immediate Home Rule’.
¹²⁷
In London, the Secretary of State, Austen Chamberlain, was sympathetic. Like the Viceroy's, his reforming instincts were cautious. But, in the summer of 1917, Chamberlain was swept away by the damning report of the Mesopotamia Commission which blamed the India Office and the government of India for mismanaging the disastrous advance on Baghdad. He was replaced by a Liberal, a protégé of Asquith, but now a follower of Lloyd George, Edwin Montagu. Montagu had known the India Office as a junior minister. As a Jew, he was alert to the racial arrogance of British officialdom of which educated Indians so often complained. Most of all, he was fiercely critical of the bureaucratic mentality of the Civilian Raj. The government of India was ‘too wooden, too iron, too inelastic, too antediluvian’, he told the House of Commons shortly before his appointment. It had to become political, to argue its case, to win over opinion. With his abrasive manner and radical ideas, Montagu was an unlikely appointment to the India Office. But the accident of war had given him a doctor's mandate to shake up the lethargic Indian government and head off the danger of Indian unrest – at the very moment when the receding hope of victory in Europe made help from the empire countries all the more vital. In August 1917, Montagu extracted from the War Cabinet permission to announce a new departure in Indian politics. In his famous announcement on 20 August 1917, India was promised ‘the gradual development of self-governing institutions’ and ‘the progressive realization of responsible government…as an integral part of the British Empire’.
¹²⁸
What this coded language seemed to mean was that the Viceroy's opposition to ‘colonial
swaraj
’ had been overcome. The days of ‘constitutional despotism’ were numbered. India's political future lay in the promotion to dominion-type self-government that the Congress had so long been demanding.

The Congress–League scheme had been careful to disavow interference with India's imperial burdens, the likely cause of objections from London. External affairs, the princely states and the army budget were all excluded from the purview of the new elected councils it called for at provincial and All-India level.
¹²⁹
But over internal affairs the control of elected Indians was to be very wide. Resolutions passed by the councils could be carried against the veto of the executive at the second attempt. The old adversary, the Indian Civil Service, was to be removed altogether from the new executive bodies in the provinces and in the government of India in Delhi, to be replaced by a mixture of appointed Indians and British from ‘home’, free (it was assumed) from the taint of the Civilian ethos. Montagu's plan was to extend devolution at the provincial level and push India firmly down the road to federation, the only ‘thinkable’ policy, he told Lloyd George.
¹³⁰
In the autumn of 1917, he set out for India to persuade the Viceroy and the Civilians to adopt a much more drastic form of provincial self-government than they had intended, to reduce central control over provincial revenues and leave much of the provinces’ affairs to elected Indian ministers. These ideas were badly received. When Montagu met the Viceroy and the provincial governors – the barons of the Civilian Raj – in Delhi, he was dismayed by the governors’ hostility to real reform.
¹³¹
But, in 1918, the Civilian Raj was in low water. Its reputation for competence had been destroyed by the Mesopotamia Commission. Under this cloud, it had little hope of appealing over Montagu's head to opinion at home. If they did not heed his advice, Montagu bluntly told the governors, ‘I would resign and they must get somebody else’.
¹³²
Moreover, the need for a radical overhaul was voiced as much by ‘imperialists’ as by radicals in Britain. Lionel Curtis, the ‘prophet’ of the ‘Round Table’ (the influential pressure group for imperial federation), who was reputed to have the ear of Lords Milner and Curzon, as well as that of
The Times
(or so Montagu believed), had mobilised opinion in India and Britain behind an even more radical scheme of provincial devolution, breaking up the provinces into ‘provincial states’.
¹³³
The senior Civilians also knew that the demands of the war effort were bound to grow even more voracious, and with them the need for Indian cooperation. In the triangle of Indian politics, both London and local opinion were against them. They could not obstruct simultaneously a reforming minister and the grand coalition of Indian politicians.