The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (28 page)

As for the French, they were depicted by cartoonists as brainsick, skeletal starvelings eating grass or frogs for want of anything else. After the advent of Bonaparte, they appeared posturing in comic-opera uniforms. Louis Simond, who toured Britain during 1814, found his countrymen everywhere portrayed as simian pygmies ‘strutting about in huge hats’ and brandishing sabres.
17
By now the image of England was John Bull, a rubicund, overweight farmer who carried a cudgel and had no time for anything foreign. This stereotype, complete with early nineteenth-century clothes, would endure for a further hundred and fifty years, reappearing in cartoons of the two twentieth-century world wars.

The French wars had reinvigorated British patriotism and laid the foundations of that assertive superiority which was manifest throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. The popular, belligerent, jingoist imperialism which emerged in the 1880s and 1890s had its roots in the nationalism of the Napoleonic era.

Inseparable from aggressive patriotism was a sense of moral rectitude. The war had been an ordeal which had tested the nation’s inner strengths and from which it had emerged with its values vindicated and enhanced. An obituary of George III, who died in 1820, idealised him and the younger Pitt as national saviours at a time of extreme peril:

Together they walked in noble sincerity and purpose, and heroic energy of resolution, throughout the darkest periods of our modern history – struggling to defend the ark of the British constitution, and the majesty of the British name, against the storms by which they were assailed – maintaining the native hue of courage and constancy amid the wreck of empire and desolation of the civilised world.
18

There were other heroes. Nelson and Wellington were elevated as models of all that was outstanding in the British national character. Their quiet, manly courage, love of the country, selflessness and high sense of duty would be continually set before youth as examples worthy of imitation. The moral disciplines of the great were understood and adopted by many of those whom they led. A cavalry trooper who served under Wellington and then in India, summed up his memoir of twenty-six years’ service with a statement of his private creed. ‘I only did the duty of a soldier, the task that was put before me I managed with God’s assistance to acquit myself with faults, blame or shame.’
19

The war against France had been a testing ground for another virtue which was now thought to be peculiarly British; self-sacrifice in a just cause. ‘England lamented but did not grudge the carnage of Waterloo,’ wrote Lord Denman in an appeal for renewed efforts against the slave trade. ‘Many a British mother bewailed a son fallen on that fatal field, but no British mother repented of the sacrifice. England felt, we all felt, that that field was worthy of the sacrifice.’
20
The debt was passed to future generations, and was acknowledged by Robert Browning in his ‘Home Thoughts from the Sea’written in the heyday of mid-Victorian prosperity:

Nobly, nobly Cape Saint Vincent to the north-west died away;

Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay;

Bluish mid the burning water, full in the face Trafalgar lay;

In the dimmest north-east distance, dawned Gibraltar grand and gray;

‘Here and here did England help me: how can I help England?’ – say,

Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God to praise and pray,

While Jove’s planet rises yonder, silent over Africa.

After 1815 the British saw themselves, as they had always done, as a nation favoured by Providence, but now the fine metal of their special virtues had been assayed and found to be pure and infinitely superior to baser, foreign alloys. Victory bred arrogance and a feeling that Britain represented, in its system of government and the industry of its people, the highest state yet reached by civilisation.

The possession of overseas territories contributed little as yet to this national pride. The peace treaties of 1814–15 had added to British possessions with confirmation of ownership of Malta, the Ionian Islands, Trinidad, Tobago, St Lucia, what is now Guyana, Cape Colony and Mauritius. With the exception of the West Indian islands, the chief fruits of conquest were naval bases sited to secure future control over the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean. Significantly, Britain was prepared to hand back some of her spoils, all of commercial value. Guadeloupe and Réunion were returned to France, and Java and Surinam to the Netherlands, which helped bring about concessions on the Continent which favoured British interests.

The post-war bargaining over colonies is instructive. Britain was a maritime power which lived by international trade. Her by now rapidly expanding manufacturing industries and her older commerce in reexported tropical commodities found their largest markets in Europe. European peace and stability were therefore essential for British commerce; as for the rest of the world, all that was required was a permanent naval presence which would safeguard the sea-lanes and, on occasions, assert the rights of British businessmen. In 1815 captive, colonial markets and sources of raw materials were a bonus to the country which dominated every area of world trade. The war had helped Britain achieve this ascendancy and it had fostered a belligerent, often self-righteous outlook which made it relatively easy for the British to exploit their advantages at the same time as representing themselves as mankind’s benefactors.

PART THREE

W
IDER
S
TILL AND
W
IDER
1815–1914

1

Power and Greatness: Commerce, Seapower and Strategy, 1815–70

For the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century Britain appeared as a colossus astride the world. Britain dominated every field of human activity and its people seemed to possess an almost demonic energy. On seeing the thriving port of Sydney in January 1836, Charles Darwin wrote, ‘My first feeling was to congratulate myself that I was born an Englishman.’
1
The city’s buildings and bustle were evidence of ‘the power of the British nation’ and a contrast to the lassitude of the Spanish and Portuguese, whose former colonies he had just visited and where, he concluded, little progress had been made over the past three hundred years. Likewise the missionary-explorer David Livingstone, on passing through the Portuguese colony of Angola in 1855, observed that ‘had it been in the possession of England’ it would have become a mass-producer of cotton and its interior been opened up by a railway.
2

Men of Darwin’s and Livingstone’s generation recognised three sources of that peculiarly British power which was currently transforming the world. The first was the native inventiveness and application of its people which had been the moving force behind the second, the growth of Britain’s manufacturing industry. Finally, there was naval supremacy, which made it possible for Britain to penetrate new markets and to count for something in the affairs of the world.

There was also, and this was continually announced from the pulpit and set down in tracts and editorials, that inner strength and purposefulness that individuals derived from a Christian faith which set a high store on personal integrity, hard work and a dedication to the general welfare of all mankind. Something of these qualities and their effect on the mind and conduct of a man active in the promotion of British interests abroad can be found in the musings of Edward Pine, a surgeon with the 58th Regiment. In 1842 he had served in the China War and two years later, having failed to find a practice in Britain, he was bound with his regiment for New South Wales. Crossing the Pacific and in melancholic mood, he analysed his faith, whose ingredients were:

A piety which refers every event to the providence of God; every action to his will; a love which counts no service hard, and a penitence which esteems no judgement severe; a gratitude which offers praise even in adversity; a holy trust unbroken by protracted suffering, and a hope triumphant over death.

Reassured by these thoughts, Pine later wrote, ‘the greatest satisfaction results from the strict performance of one’s duty – I pray God that my best efforts may be directed to that end.’
3
This and similar private creeds collectively strengthened what was to become a national conviction: Britain had been chosen by Providence as an instrument of universal progress.

Progress was inseparable from the Industrial Revolution. It had proceeded slowly and unevenly from the middle of the eighteenth century and would be more or less complete by 1860. The growth of large-scale manufacturing industry had coincided with a population explosion: in 1801 there were roughly ten million people in Britain, a total which had risen to over twenty-two million by 1871 despite emigration and the Irish famine of 1845–7. Had Britain remained a largely agrarian country, the inevitable outcome of growth on this scale would have been famines of the kind seen today in parts of Africa. The Industrial Revolution proved Britain’s salvation for it absorbed its surplus population.

This process solved one problem, but created others. In the thirty years after Waterloo the new workforce faced a precarious existence, since its only hope of survival lay in an ever-increasing market for manufactured goods. This could only be achieved as long as products remained cheap, and so wages were depressed. Here industrialists were assisted by the 1834 Poor Law, which was deliberately contrived to make conditions for the unemployed so unbearable that they were driven to seek work or emigrate. Sometimes there was no work available even for the willing. Recessions, which occurred regularly between 1815 and the mid-1840s, were accompanied by mass lay-offs, public disorders and outbursts of often violent political radicalism. Matters were made worse by the fact that by 1840 Britain could no longer produce enough food to sustain its population.

Free trade offered an escape from these difficulties. Its partisans argued that the abolition of all duties would lower the costs of imported raw materials and make exports more affordable, and therefore more competitive. At the same time, food prices would fall thanks to the opening of the British market to American and European grain. Steps towards free trade had been taken, tentatively, in the 1820s when the Tory government had removed the Navigation Acts and reduced tariffs. The slump of the early 1840s saw a revival of demands for free trade, largely from Northern and Midland industrialists who were keen to stimulate business and reduce unemployment through an export drive.
4
The Tory government of Sir Robert Peel responded encouragingly, but the stumbling block was the Corn Laws which protected home-grown grain against foreign competition. The hitherto dominant landed interest resisted what it saw as an erosion of its source of wealth, but its claims were ultimately overridden by the fact that domestic agriculture could no longer satisfy national demand. This failure was horrifyingly demonstrated by the Irish famine, and in 1846 the Corn Laws were jettisoned.

Britain’s conversion to free trade in the 1840s coincided with a determined effort to open up new markets. The volume of Britain’s overseas trade had expanded steadily since 1815. The largest outlets were Europe and the United States, which together accounted for two-thirds of the £50 million earned by exports in 1827. This pattern continued for the next forty years. In 1867, when Britain’s exports totalled £181 million, goods sold in countries outside the empire accounted for £131 million. There had been expansion everywhere, most spectacularly in South America where, in 1867, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Peru imported products worth just over £12 million.

For a time it had been imagined that free trade would irreparably damage those colonial economies which relied on preferential treatment for their raw materials. The West Indian sugar producers suffered worst. They were the victims of a breathtaking example of contemporary humbug, for they had been forced to emancipate their slaves in 1833 and then, by the 1846 Sugar Duties Act, had to compete in a free market with sugar imported from the slave-operated plantations of Cuba and Brazil. Not surprisingly, the economy of the British West Indies collapsed. An estate in British Guiana, which had been purchased for £24,000 in 1840, was sold for £2,700 nine years later, and then parcelled into small-holdings for former slaves, who became subsistence farmers. The annual value of Britain’s exports to her West Indian colonies plummeted from an average of £4 million in the 1820s to less than half that amount by the 1860s.

Other colonial economies survived the loss of their old commercial privileges, a phenomenon which puzzled some observers who believed them incapable of surviving in a free market. Indeed, during the 1850s and early 1860s there had been a lobby of free-traders who had called for the cutting of political links with the colonies, whose government and defence were an unwelcome charge on Britain’s budget for which there was no obvious return. In fact the empire was a valuable outlet for British products. In 1867, India imported goods worth £21 million, which made it a market equal to Britain’s largest foreign customer, the United States. The other totals were impressive; exports to Australia totalled £8 million, Canada £5.8 million, Hong Kong £2.5 million, Singapore £2 million, and New Zealand £1.6 million. Of course given that Britain possessed just under half the world’s industrial capacity at the time, her colonies, like everyone else, had little choice but to import British manufactures.

The expression ‘workshop of the world’ is now a cliché, but it still best describes Britain’s international trading position from 1815 to 1870. There were some free trade enthusiasts in the 1840s who looked forward to a time in the near future when all Britain’s energies would be devoted to industry, whose workforce would live off cheap imported food from America and Europe. As in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Britain’s commercial success rested on the export of inexpensive staple goods. Machine-produced cotton dominated; during the 1830s cottonware from the Lancashire mills made up more than half of Britain’s exports. In 1867 the value of all kinds of cotton, including yarn for weaving elsewhere, was £55.9 million. Next in importance came woollen cloth (£18 million), coal (£5.4 million), railway track (£4.8 million) and steam engines (£1.9 million). The last items indicate that by this time Britain was exporting her technology to other countries to assist their programmes of industrialisation.