The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (71 page)

The fate of the treaty was watched in London with great anxiety. The risk of embroiling the North – where Catholic nationalists were harassed by Protestant paramilitaries – seemed high. Michael Collins, the charismatic leader of the IRA, who led the Free State army in the civil war, was suspected of duplicity: few tears were shed in London when he was ambushed and murdered by the anti-treaty forces in August 1922.
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For British leaders, the success of the Free State government was critical if Ireland was to escape a further round of turmoil and then a further round of imperial crisis. Partly for that reason, they acquiesced in a quasi-republican constitution in which authority was derived from ‘the people of Ireland’ (not the king-in-parliament).
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When the North rejected a united Ireland and the boundary settlement left the frontier unchanged, they sweetened the pill for the Dublin government by financial concessions. The Free State government won a popular mandate, but the balance seemed fine. The army mutiny of 1924, the continued threat of IRA violence and the return of the anti-treatyites (as Fianna Fail) to the Dail, made its tenure seem fragile. The danger that it would repudiate the treaty and declare a republic could not be ruled out.
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British leaders may have exaggerated the risk. Despite the hangover of republican violence, the Free State government represented a powerful body of Irish opinion that preferred free trade (with Britain) to isolation and autarky,
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and accepted that, without the association with Britain, the Irish voice in international affairs would be embarrassingly faint.
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To the larger farmers and local businessmen who formed the backbone of the old Irish party before 1914, and supported the treatyite Cumann na nGaedheal, overthrowing the constitution was a menace to order. For the champions of Catholic conservatism, the most influential ideology in the new state,
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republicanism was suspect for its atheism and socialism. Cosgrave and O’Higgins, his dynamic deputy, were determined to restore an ordered society of strong institutions, lawful authority and firm discipline.
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Their aim was not to break the treaty, but to free themselves from the surviving relics of Ireland's subordination to Britain – in part to disarm their Fianna Fail opponents. This was why at the Imperial Conference they were quick to follow Hertzog with a list of detailed ‘anomalies’ in dominion status, and why O’Higgins insisted that Ireland's separate status should be formally marked in the royal title. When the ‘O’Higgins comma’ was inserted, the king was no longer ‘King of Great Britain and Ireland’ and the overseas dominions, but ‘King of Great Britain, Ireland, and the British Dominions’. To Birkenhead, one of the signatories of the Anglo-Irish treaty, the need to meet the Irish leaders over their ‘tiresome points’
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and protect a settlement that is ‘working better than our most extravagant hopes’ was unarguable. In Ireland, more than anywhere else, what mattered most was to make cooperation a habit and ingrain the constitutionalist outlook that was its greatest ally.

Like Hertzog (who returned in triumph to South Africa), the Irish leaders found merit in the constitutional experiment codified by the conference. They had equal status and external autonomy. In return, they accepted the Crown (with some ambiguity) as their head of state and the symbol of their membership of the ‘Empire-Commonwealth’ – a term just creeping into use. Like the other dominions, they recognised the British system as the magnetic pole of their external relations. Like them, they had much to lose from an open break. For the moment, it seemed that Ireland might be shaped to the mould of an ‘imperial nation’, to become another Canada in substance as well as form. The stresses of the next decade would settle the question.

The Empire at home

After 1918, there was good reason to doubt whether the vast world-system the late Victorians had assembled would command the support of British society at home. A positive view of its costs and risks sprang from the distinctive complex of ideology and politics in late-Victorian Britain. The late Victorians had been loyal to
laissez-faire
economics. They accepted the logic of free trade and the gold standard and regarded with equanimity their ever-growing dependence on foreign food, foreign trade and a foreign income from investments. They acknowledged the force of the geopolitical corollary. That Britain must be a global power to defend the sphere of free commerce and guard its long lines of maritime transport was argued over in detail but rarely disputed in principle. The electorate that sanctioned this globe-wide imperialism excluded all women and more than one-third of adult men. No party dedicated to the ideas of socialism or the sectional interests of the working class could win a majority in parliament. The electorate's antipathy to Irish nationalism, partly on sectarian grounds, made it amenable to arguments for coercion elsewhere: unionism at home helped underwrite imperialism abroad. And, although some of its articles had come under attack in Edwardian politics – in the struggle over tariff reform and Irish Home Rule – the prime assumptions of this ‘liberal imperialism’ went largely unchallenged until the First World War.

In the new landscape of post-war economics and politics, this late-Victorian consensus looked less secure. Economic discontent was real enough in late-Victorian society and industrial militancy had been a striking feature of the pre-war decade. But their political impact had been blunted by the general prosperity of skilled workers and by a franchise that excluded many of those most vulnerable to economic misfortune – the army of unskilled and casual labour. By the end of 1920, these pre-war conditions no longer held good. The post-war depression brought high unemployment to skilled workers as well as unskilled. It affected those organised in trade unions (a much larger number than before the war) as well as those who were not. But the most important change was that all men affected by the slump in trade now had the vote since adult males over twenty-one, as well as some women, had been enfranchised in the reform Act of 1918. The result politically was profoundly unsettling. A prolonged depression would mean an alienated class, excluded by poverty, but included by politics. It would be empowered by the franchise against a social system from which it had nothing to gain. Not surprisingly, fear of a ‘socialism’ (a vaguely defined creed) that would be swept into power by a working-class electorate, haunted the politicians of the older parties.
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For there seemed no doubt about who would be the beneficiary of the two new facts of British politics: the great pool of working-class discontent and the huge new electorate (three times as big as the old) with no tradition of loyalty to either Liberals or Conservatives. In the excitable climate bred by the Russian revolution and industrial confrontation in Britain – at its tensest in 1921 – it was easy to credit the Labour party with the extremist views from which its leaders recoiled. Pacifism, ‘bolshevik’ sympathies, and antipathy to colonial rule, especially in India, seemed synonymous with socialism.

These fears (in some quarters, hopes) turned out to be exaggerated. It was industrial labour, not political Labour, that proved the real threat to the British world-system. It rejected the sacrifices on which the revival of London's commercial empire was supposed to depend. At the end of the war, it was widely agreed by expert opinion that British prosperity meant restoring the commercial conditions that had ruled in 1914. London must resume its place as the world's greatest banker, lender and market-place. The gold standard must be revived as a self-regulating mechanism of monetary control and the guarantee of sterling's worth as
the
global currency. British debts must be repaid. British exports must recover lost markets and win new ones to ease the strain on the balance of payments and help renew the flow of outward investment. At government level, this programme meant the stringent control of public expenditure. But its social and industrial meaning was much more drastic. If British exports were to be competitive, British costs had to fall. The large gains in real income conceded in the war and its inflationary aftermath would have to be clawed back. By Keynes’ estimate, while the cost of living had risen by 60 per cent, the combined effect of higher wages and shorter hours had more than doubled real wages.
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The fierce deflation of 1920–1 was aimed in part at this objective. But its results were not what its authors intended. The numbers of unemployed rose rapidly from 700,000 at the end of 1920 to over two million by mid-1921 and remained above 1.2 million for the rest of the decade. But it proved impossible to push down the wages of those in work. Instead, the sharp fall in prices that deflation produced boosted their real incomes still further, by some 13 per cent between 1919 and 1922, on top of the wartime rise.
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In the climate of industrial militancy and electoral uncertainty that dominated the early 1920s, imposing a wholesale reduction of wages was out of the question. It would have meant economic controls as draconian as in wartime, repellent alike to capital and labour, and hastily scrapped in 1919. In a tacit social and political bargain, those in work kept the real income gains of 1914–22 (the exception were the miners).
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The unintended victims were the unemployed.

Worker resistance to cuts in real wages had a real significance for the part Britain played in her imperial system. It made the price of the return to gold in 1925 – the
sine qua non
of commercial empire – uncomfortably high, and cut down the benefits it was supposed to bring. High interest rates, a fragile pound and a restricted stream of investment abroad were the penalty for setting the gold value of sterling at a level designed to compete with the dollar, but without the fall in industrial costs that was needed to make British exports competitive. In the crucial phase of economic adjustment, industrial labour had refused to give up what it had gained since 1914, and could not be coerced into doing so. It could not be bent to the purpose of a revived commercial empire. Its resistance to the ‘logic’ of bankers and businessmen could be seen, indeed, as an instinctive form of metropolitan ‘isolationism’, a refusal to bow to the harsh demands of the international economy. It set the limits to the post-war promise of the British world-system.

This was the most potent (if least conscious) act of worker ‘anti-imperialism’. At the same time, the rapid growth of a mass constituency for the Labour party (Labour vote, 1910: 371,722; 1918: 2,385,472; 1922: 4,241,383; 1923: 4,438,508; 1924: 5,489,077) lent added weight to radical opinion in imperial matters. Before 1914, critics of empire had attacked the cost of imperial wars, the threat to peace of imperial rivalry, the authoritarian trend of colonial rule and the commercial exploitation of indigenous peoples. But their voice had been muffled by political concession in India and South Africa, the diplomatic settlement of colonial disputes (especially with France) and the domestic (rather than imperial) threat posed by the new German navy. Even J. A. Hobson, the critic-in-chief of British imperialism, had come to concede the beneficent effects of international trade.
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But, as the war dragged on, he revived (in
Democracy after the War
(1917)) the old claim that imperial antagonism was the real cause of conflict. With militarism enthroned at the heart of government, and imperialism (in the person of Milner) at its elbow, an Allied victory would mean the triumph of reaction. The ‘imperialist’ project, checked since 1906, would resume its course. An imperial tariff, territorial expansion and the economic exploitation of Afro-Asian peoples would destroy free trade at home, cut down living standards and corrode the tradition of political liberty. The best defence was a league of nations, ‘international government’ and the careful protection of indigenous cultures against the social damage of enforced industrialism. In the last year of the war, this radical programme received a powerful boost. Official endorsement of the idea of a league, the publication of Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points and the emergence of Labour (which Hobson joined in 1918) as a mass-based party, strengthened its claim on public attention.

Hobson's warnings were echoed by the band of writers who made up Labour's ‘intelligence branch’ in imperial policy: Leonard Woolf, whose
Empire and Commerce in Africa
(1920) denounced colonial rule as a licence to rob; Sydney Olivier, whose
The League of Nations and Primitive Peoples
(1918) pressed the case for international trusteeship; and E. D. Morel, veteran of the Congo campaign, who published
The Black Man's Burden
in 1920. Their critical view of the pre-war world (Olivier believed that the humanitarian traditions of colonial rule had been corrupted by business after 1890)
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chimed with a larger body of ‘middle opinion’ disillusioned by political, diplomatic and economic failure in the aftermath of the war. A new commitment to the reconstruction of Europe was urged by Alfred Zimmern in
Europe in Convalescence
(1922). The destructive impact of the reparations demand was condemned by J. M. Keynes in
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
(1920). The hidden commitments and secret promises that had sheltered ‘old diplomacy’ from public opinion were denounced in Lowes Dickinson's
The International Anarchy
in 1926. Such polemics by themselves meant little. But the electoral support for the Liberals and Labour (in 1923, they commanded together nearly nine million votes to the Conservatives’ five and a half) suggested that a large body of public opinion took a similar ‘neo-Gladstonian’ view of Britain's overseas interests. The pre-war version of imperial diplomacy (if not already discredited) had been made redundant by victory. Peaceful cooperation through an international concert, not an empire in arms, was the need of the moment. The predatory instincts of colonial settlers and businessmen should be carefully restrained before they whipped up revolt, or provoked a fresh clash between colonial powers. A new bond of sympathy must be forged with the aspirations of colonial peoples, when they embraced the values of the Liberal state.