The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (80 page)

It was true that dominionhood left undefined the terms of the British connection in several crucial respects and made the tacit concession that any dominion could secede from the Empire if it chose. The fact that no dominion did so after 1931 was not because there was a constitutional bar, but because in each case the balance of its politics was against such a move. New Zealand's Labour government, elected in 1935, might have had little ideological sympathy with the National Government in London. But its deep British attachment was strongly affirmed: ‘New Zealand was bound to Britain by unbreakable ties of blood’, declared the new prime minister.
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Its planned economy rested on hopes of closer economic integration with Britain – the only real outlet for the increased production of primary products.
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At the other end of the spectrum, the Irish Free State under De Valera's Fianna Fail government rejected the oath of allegiance, refused to pay the annuities owing under the 1921 treaty, and resisted the economic coercion with which London responded. In 1937, a new constitution recognised the Crown but only by virtue of Eire's ‘external association’ with the Commonwealth. But De Valera stopped short of declaring a republic or leaving the Commonwealth, partly because to have done so seemed likely to erase any hope of Ireland's reunification.
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For all the dominions, the greatest source of concern was Britain's involvement in a new European conflict. For Australia and New Zealand, this arose from anxiety that London might overlook its real imperial duty in the Asia-Pacific. In South Africa and Canada, it sprang from the fear that, unless Britain itself was in obvious danger, the local response would foment a racial divide and destroy the fragile consensus on which dominionhood rested. As Europe slid towards war, both kinds of risk grew greater and greater.

Holding India: ‘from power to influence’?
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Had India become the grand anomaly in the British world-system by the mid-1930s? Certainly some people thought so. ‘India is a great historical accident and remains an incredible anomaly’, opined John Dafoe. Hindus and Muslims, he thought, ‘are not part of the moral unit…I might call the British Commonwealth of Nations’.
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The link between Britain and the white dominions had now become voluntary. It was a matter of choice, however theoretical, whether or not to stay in the Empire. In much of the tropical empire, the demand for self-government barely existed as yet outside a very narrow elite. But India was different. There, since the end of the First World War, the British had faced a mass nationalist movement whose leaders had called if not for
purna swaraj
(complete independence) then for self-government as full as that of Australia or Canada. Under Gandhi's dynamic direction, the Indian National Congress had challenged British authority in a large-scale campaign of civil disobedience that was only abandoned (in 1922) for fear of a rising spiral of violence. But, as a tactical weapon, as well as a way of restoring momentum and extending support, it retained its appeal to the Congress' Gandhian wing. In 1930, it was turned to again to lever major concessions at a time when the British seemed at sixes and sevens.

The British for their part seemed less sure than they had been before 1914 about what their Raj was to do. The social problems of India had always seemed daunting, but now they were more conscious than ever that they had only makeshift solutions. The Royal Commission on Indian Agriculture (1928) was set up to inquire into the causes of low productivity. But it pointedly ignored the key issue of land tenure so as not to enrage the Raj's key allies among the landholding classes. As the Congress pushed deeper into rural society, the old British claim that they were the guardians of peasants and cultivators looked more and more threadbare. Indeed, the reforms of 1918–19 were meant to shift the burden of social questions towards the ‘transferred’ departments in provincial governments under the charge of elected Indian ministers. The Raj seemed to be asking, as Milner had asked of the British in Egypt in 1920: ‘Are we trying to do too much for these people and getting ourselves disliked without materially benefiting them?’
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Yet (as we have seen) the British could hardly imagine an imperial life after India. The real issue for them was how they could reconcile the Indians’ demand for self-government (which they accepted in principle) with their own irreducible interests. It was India's contribution to the strength and cohesion of the British world-system that really concerned them. Despite its savage contraction as a buyer of Lancashire cottons, India remained a key market for Britain's industrial products, all the more so in the age of the segmented global economy and closed trading blocs. Thus, although the overall value of British exports to India fell in the 1930s, India remained the largest single market for cotton piece-goods, machinery and chemicals, and the second or third market for electricals and iron and steel goods.
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Nor was trade the only or most important economic consideration. Some £500 million (around 12 per cent of British overseas capital) was invested in India, three-quarters of it in government debt. India also contributed to the British balance of payments through its payment for services, pensions (for British officials), debt interest (mostly on railways) and the costs of the large British garrison ‘borrowed’ from home. Before 1931, and even more so after, any change that might affect India's ability to pay these ‘Home Charges’ rang loud alarm bells in London. An elected government in Delhi that sent the garrison home, repudiated its debts or devalued the rupee might wreck sterling's precarious stability.
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It was hard enough sometimes to bully the Viceroy and his British officials: an independent government of India would be a different matter entirely. It was widely agreed in London that Britain's ‘financial stake…in India remains, for all practical purposes, as a permanent obstacle to anything that could reasonably be termed financial self-government’.
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In the Depression decade, commerce and finance were an urgent concern. But even more rooted in British thinking about India was its strategic importance. This could be thought of as active and passive. By comparison with other parts of the British world-system, India's defence budget was huge: six times that of Australia, the next biggest spender. India still paid the ordinary costs of almost one-third of Britain's regular army, stationed in the sub-continent. By convention, India's own army of some 140,000 men, with its British officer corps, was also available for imperial duty, although London would pay the ‘extraordinary’ costs. After 1920, it was accepted that imperial use of this ‘sepoy’ army would be careful and sparing; but India remained the strategic reserve of the British Empire in Asia and its great supply base in war. Troops and supplies could be sent from its ports to a vast arc of targets from Cairo to Shanghai. Its vast pool of labour was a pioneer corps in waiting – as in 1914–18. But ‘passively’ also India was crucial. Together with British-ruled Burma and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), its orientation was one key to the Asian balance of power, and thus that of the world as a whole. Its Muslim minority looked towards Persia and the Arab Middle East. The leaders of Congress admired Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist struggle in China, and some of them longed for a pan-Asian front against British imperialism. But, from the British perspective, a divided, neutral or hostile India, spread-eagled across their route to Southeast Asia, Australasia and China, would be an unimaginable disaster. So hard was it to think of ‘imperial defence’ in these terms that the ‘loss’ of India was almost literally unthinkable.

The constitutional tactics that the British pursued to safeguard their interests and sap Indian opposition were extraordinarily tortuous, although this was partly because of their own internal divisions. The first constitutional scheme was advanced by the Simon Commission, set up in 1927–8 to review the Montford reforms. The Commission (which was boycotted by most Indian leaders in protest against its ‘all-white’ complexion) proposed to give the Indian provinces almost complete control of their local affairs (‘provincial autonomy’ with ministerial or ‘responsible’ government on the Westminster model), with the distant prospect of eventual federation when and if they agreed upon it. In the central government, the Viceroy's executive power would remain unfettered by a toothless central assembly, while the Indian army would be placed even more clearly under London's control, with a guaranteed budget that Indian politicians could not even discuss.
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Simon's object was clear. If the provinces became the arena where Indian politicians could exercise real power, provincial and not ‘All-India’ politics would attract most political energy. The Congress party as a ‘national’ movement would soon fall apart as its provincial divisions went their own separate ways and abandoned the chimaera of early British withdrawal. In political terms, the Raj would have rounded Cape Horn.

Simon's scheme was shot down not so much by its Indian critics as by the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, who saw the lack of any advance at the ‘centre’ as the cause around which Congress would unite to disrupt British rule. He had already insisted that the promise of India's future dominionhood should be clearly affirmed. What Irwin urged was a round table conference at which all interested parties – British and Indian – would draw up proposals for a new constitution. Three such conferences in London in 1930–2 failed to produce an agreed solution. But they did throw up a novel suggestion on which the British seized with alacrity. This was the idea of an ‘All-India’ federation of the Indian states (whose Princes acknowledged Britain's ‘paramount’ power) as well as the ‘British Indian’ provinces.
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The seductive charm of this scheme was its promise of a large conservative bloc of Princes and Muslims (who would keep separate representation) in a new federal government, antipathetic to Congress and anxious to keep the ‘British connection’ as their political guardian for (at least) a long time to come. In the federal assembly that the British envisaged – and to which the Viceroy's government would gradually become more and more answerable as dominionhood arrived by instalments – one-third of the seats would be filled by Muslims and one-third by the delegates sent by the Princes. Even if Congress won all of the open seats that remained, the most vociferous opponents of the British connection could never command a majority.

But, leaving nothing to chance (and under the baleful eye of the Die Hards), London piled up further defences against any untoward weakening of the imperial interest in India. A mass of safeguards entrenched the executive powers of the Viceroy against interference in the army, in India's external relations, or in the rights of minorities. These were meant to continue even after India had become a dominion. The Viceroy also had powers to set the level of spending on the items of greatest interest in London: defence; the pension bill; and railway expenditure. One Congress leader commented acidly that scarcely one-fifth of federal spending would pass under the scrutiny of the federal assembly.
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However, what British plans really relied on was the provincial dynamic towards which Simon had pointed. Giving provincial autonomy would draw Indian leaders away from rhetorical politics towards ‘real’ and ‘responsible’ political power, and make them far more responsive to the needs of their voters. Provincial politics would also come to reflect the wide variation in interests and attitudes in different parts of the sub-continent. Provincial government ministers, even those in the Congress, would resist the demands of ‘All-India’ nationalists and wriggle free from their grasp. All-India politics would be fraught with frustrations for those who aspired to drive out the British. Boxed in by the rules, and by the careful design of the federal assembly, they would find very little had left the Viceroy's control. Yet to struggle against him by mass agitation would get harder and harder against the indifference or hostility of provincial politicians, where control over the party machine would soon come to lie.

But how realistic was this machiavellian scheme? Did the British really have the power on the ground to make it work as they wished? Could they hold on long enough to bend Indian politics in the direction they wanted? There were certainly grounds for a positive view. One of them was the resilience of the old ‘steel frame’, the so-called ‘Superior Services’: the 800 or so members of the Indian Civil Service (ICS); the 150-strong Indian Political Service (still almost entirely British-born
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) that dealt with the Princes, and the 500 British officers of the Indian Police. Under the 1935 Act, the pay and conditions of the Superior Services remained under London's control. The Indian Civil Service retained much of its cherished cohesion. It was, said the Viceroy (Lord Willingdon, 1931–6), ‘the most powerful Trade Union that I know’.
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In the late 1930s, despite uncertainties and under-recruitment, British-born officials still made up the majority of its ranks.
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Nor was the loyalty of its Indian contingent yet in serious doubt.
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Faced with the growth of Indian political activity, the ICS accepted the need to enlarge provincial self-government and increase the shift towards federalism originally envisaged before 1914. It learned from mass civil unrest and the bursts of terrorism in Bengal, the risks of exposing its minute administrative manpower, the need to employ more indirect methods, and the logic of retreat to the political centre both in the provinces and in India as a whole. The Indian politicians would have to be guided, not governed. In keeping with this was a new political mantra put about by its leaders. ‘The civilian who used to serve by ruling must learn to rule by serving’, said an Old India Hand, Sir Edward Blunt.
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