The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (30 page)

By 1870 the apparatus of informal empire was in place in every quarter of the world. Asian and African princes were bound by treaties in which they pledged themselves not to molest missionaries and merchants, and to suppress slave-trading and piracy; Latin America was safe for business and investment; and it was possible to speak of Britain’s ‘practical protectorate’ over the Turkish empire.
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Even though the primary purpose of informal empire was to make the world a safe place for the British to trade in, it was also the imposition of a higher morality. Slavery and piracy were wrong, and, when they moved abroad, the British expected to find the same standards of official honesty and detachment as obtained at home.

Informal empire depended on British maritime supremacy. In 1815 the Royal Navy possessed 214 battleships and nearly 800 smaller vessels. There were considerable post-war cuts, but in 1817 the Foreign Secretary, Viscount Castlereagh, insisted that Britain’s security required her to maintain ‘a navy equal to the navies of any two powers that can be brought against us’.
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This principle was more or less upheld for the rest of the century, despite regular calls for cheeseparing from lobbies who held that it was the government’s first duty to keep down expenditure and taxation. Invasion scares, which occurred frequently throughout Victoria’s reign, silenced demands for a reduced naval budget and usually triggered a crash programme of ship-building.

Behind fears of invasion lay suspicions of Britain’s old rival, France. Between 1815 and 1870 Anglo-French relations swung between extremes of friendship and hostility. Outright war seemed possible in 1840, in 1844–5, when an aged Wellington anxiously toured the south coast looking for possible French landing sites, and in 1859. Old misgivings about French militarism and what was believed to be a national addiction to
la Gloire
died hard. On the other hand, Britain was largely tolerant of French efforts to rebuild their territorial empire by conquest in North Africa. Likewise, no action was taken when France sought to acquire Diégo Suarez as a naval base in the Indian Ocean, and made treaties with the rulers of West African states, which, unlike the agreements of British informal empire, insisted that France had sovereign rights.

This indifference vanished in 1840 when France gave its backing to Muhammad Ali, the khedive of Egypt, who was endeavouring to carve a personal empire out of Ottoman provinces in the Middle East. Memories of Napoleon’s Egyptian adventure were still fresh, and so the Mediterranean fleet was ordered to intervene. France backed down rather than risk a one-sided naval war in the Mediterranean, and British warships were free to bombard Muhammad Ali’s coastal fortresses in Syria and the Lebanon. The shells which fell on Acre were a forceful reminder that Britain would employ her seapower whenever she believed a vital interest was at stake.

There were, however, limitations to seapower. Could it, many wondered, protect Britain from her other rival, Russia? Throughout this period, Anglo-Russian relations were severely strained; what was in effect a cold war lasted from the late 1820s until the beginning of the next century. This cold war became a hot one in 1854, and very nearly did again in 1877 and 1885. Russophobia infected the minds of nearly every nineteenth-century British statesman, diplomat and strategist, and was strongly felt among all classes and shades of political opinion. It was commonly agreed that Czarist Russia was the antithesis of Britain. The personal, political and legal freedoms which characterised Britain and, according to many, gave it its strength and greatness, were totally absent in Russia. Its Czar was a tyrant and its masses a servile horde ready to respond unthinkingly to their master’s whim. ‘As the power of Russia has grown, the individuality of its subjects has disappeared,’ claimed one Russophobe in 1835. It was a state ‘irretrievably bent on acquisition’, enlarging itself to provide living space for its growing population.
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And yet for all its obvious political, social and economic backwardness, Russia had the means, an 800,000-strong army, with which to hurt Britain.

Behind this apprehension, which at times approached hysteria, was the fear that Russia would launch an overland invasion of India. The possibility of such an attack had been discussed in political, military and naval circles since the beginning of the century, when Napoleon had shown the way. Speculation and anxiety reached a new pitch after the Russo-Persian War of 1826–28 and the Russo-Turkish War of 1828–29. In the first, a Russian army, based on the Caucasus, had beaten a Persian one, and in the second, the Russians had come within striking distance of Constantinople. What emerged was that Russia had demonstrated the weakness of two Asian powers and revealed that it had the will and wherewithal to challenge Britain in a sensitive area.

India was more directly threatened by Russia’s thrust eastwards towards the Caspian. Her empire-building plans were plain and, according to the logic of the Russophobes, it was inevitable that once the khanates of central Asia had been overcome, Russia would turn its attention to India. An Indian civil servant, writing in 1838, predicted that the people of India would be ‘overwhelmed by the sea of Russian despotism’. He added, significantly, that the forthcoming contest would be between benevolent and oppressive imperialisms. If Russia won, the Indians would be made ‘the serfs of a government which, though calling itself civilised, is in truth barbarian’.
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Everyone agreed that Russia had the advantage of manpower, and much was made of the legendary endurance and ferocity of the Cossacks. Against such an adversary, the fleet would be of marginal value, although in 1832 a naval officer observed that ‘if the Russians think of going to Calcutta, we may think of visiting St Petersburg’.
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Two years later, Wellington, who was as fearful as anyone of the threat to India, put his faith in the training and courage of the Indian army. There were, however, a few isolated voices who asked the pertinent question as to how the torpid and hidebound Russian military bureaucracy would cope with the management of supply lines stretching across the Himalayas to the Caspian.
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Nevertheless, there were some Russian generals who imagined that the campaign was practical and talked airily of an expedition to India.

Their boasts, and Russian activities in Persia and on the fringes of the Turkish empire, were taken very seriously in London and Calcutta. Somehow the Russians had to be checked and it became axiomatic that Britain’s foreign policy should be directed towards this end. The Czar’s fleet had to be kept out of the Mediterranean; the integrity of Turkey, and particularly its Middle Eastern provinces, had to be preserved; and the rulers of Persia and Afghanistan had to be taught to fear Britain more than Russia.

The 1830s and 1840s witnessed all the activities which marked a cold war: diplomatic manoeuvre, intrigue, subversion and, in 1838, a British invasion of Afghanistan which went horribly awry. A Russian invasion of the Turkish Balkans in 1853 also went wrong, and led to a direct clash between Britain and France and Russia. Although the Russian army got bogged down, its navy sank the Turkish fleet near Constantinople, and Britain immediately responded by sending its Mediterranean fleet into the Bosphorus. Russia, its bluff called, tried to evade a confrontation and withdrew its ships into Sevastopol harbour, where they were later scuttled. Under pressure from the Admiralty, the British cabinet approved a seaborne expedition to the Crimea with orders to capture Sevastopol and demolish its dockyards and storehouses.

The Crimean War (1854–6) was an imperial war, the only one fought by Britain against a European power during the nineteenth century, although some would have regarded Russia as essentially an Asiatic power. No territory was at stake; the war was undertaken solely to guarantee British naval supremacy in the Mediterranean and, indirectly, to forestall any threat to India which might have followed Russia replacing Britain as the dominant power in the Middle East.

The war’s outcome was a crushing defeat for Russia. Her armies were beaten four times and Sevastopol was abandoned. Now chiefly remembered in Britain for the blunders of the British high command and the War Office’s and the Treasury’s mismanagement of the army’s logistics (which was quickly rectified), the war exposed the emptiness of Russia’s military pretensions. Its army was poorly led, armed with antiquated weaponry, supported by systems that fell apart under the slightest pressure and which could not be repaired. As British, French and some intelligent Russian observers concluded, two ‘modern’ nations had beaten one which was hopelessly backward in terms of its government, society and economy.

The
status quo
had been maintained in Britain’s favour. In November 1856 a British army landed in Persia to persuade the Shah Nasr-ud-Din to abandon his claim to Herat. This fortress on the Afghan-Persian frontier was one of those distant places which had achieved an immense symbolic and strategic importance during the Anglo-Russian cold war. The Russians had urged the Shah to hold on to it in defiance of Britain, but faced with an Anglo-Indian army, Nasr-ud-Din gave way. India’s security had been preserved, although Russia continued her advance eastwards beyond the Caspian towards the northern border of Afghanistan. Between 1864 and 1868 Russian forces occupied Khiva, Tashkent, and Samarkand.

While Russian armies were tramping towards the foothills of the Himalayas, Europe was being dramatically changed. The Crimean War had destroyed the harmony between the big powers which had prevailed since 1815. The immediate beneficiaries were the Italian and German nationalists. Between 1859 and 1870 Italy was united, with French and Prussian assistance and British approval. In three successive wars, Prussia defeated Denmark, Austria and the South German States and, supported by the rest of Germany, France. The final victory was marked by the declaration of the German empire in Louis XIV’s former palace at Versailles. Britain’s influence over the reshaping of Europe had been slight, since her strategic and commercial interests were not endangered. Indeed, the latter were advanced by the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian War during which 300 million pounds of woollen cloth were exported to make uniforms for both armies.

Some of the deals for this cloth may well have been settled in the Bradford Exchange, an imposing building finished in 1867. Its Gothic exterior was ornamented with medallions showing the features of the men who had contributed to Britain’s present wealth and greatness. Palmerston, who had died in 1865, represented firmness in dealing with anyone who interfered with Britain’s right to do business everywhere; Cobden appeared as the champion of free trade; James Watt, Richard Arkwright and the railway engineer George Stephenson were reminders of the inventive genius of the Industrial Revolution; and the features of Drake, Raleigh, Anson and Cook proclaimed the triumphs of seapower. The spirit behind this choice of images was caught by Charles Dickens in his
Dombey and Son,
which had first appeared in 1848:

The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, the sun and the moon were made to give them light. Rivers and seas were formed to float their ships; rainbows to give them the promise of fair weather; winds blew for or against their enterprises; stars and planets circled in their orbits, to preserve inviolate a system of which they were the centre.

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We are Going as Civilisers: Empire and Public Opinion, 1815–80

What did the empire mean to the British public? This question became a vital one as the nineteenth century proceeded. The thoughts and feelings of the people on this and other subjects of national concern mattered more and more as the country moved towards democracy. The 1832 Parliamentary Reform Act created a middle-class electorate, and the Reform and Redistribution Acts of 1867 and 1884–5 extended the vote to most urban and rural working men. Contemporaries sensed that they were living in an age of political progress, in which reasoned debate between educated men was being proved as the most perfect means of solving all human problems. Simultaneously, there was a growth in the numbers and readership of daily newspapers and weekly journals which disseminated information and fostered discussion of national issues. The London press took advantage of the extension of the railway network between 1840 and 1860 to build up a national circulation, and with it the ability to influence opinion throughout the country.

Views on the empire differed enormously during this period, and there was much passionate debate about how it should be managed, the best treatment for its subjects, and whether or not it should be extended. There was, on the whole, general agreement that the empire was a powerful force for the spread of civilisation through trade and the imposition of superior codes of behaviour on its ‘savage’ inhabitants. Few would have disagreed with an editorial in the
Sun,
which welcomed the announcement of the form of government chosen for Britain’s newest colony, New Zealand, in January 1847. ‘So speedy an attainment of the choicest fruits of civilisation, in a country where, a few years since, a hardy race of savages alone ranged free, ignorant of their better nature, is without parallel in history.’
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There were, however, profound differences of opinion as to whether the Maoris and other races possessed a ‘better nature’, and how it could be cultivated. On one side there were the pragmatists, who were for the most part soldiers, sailors and administrators (often former servicemen), colonists and their adherents in Britain who were sceptical about the capacity of native peoples for advancement. On the other hand there was a powerful body of Christian philanthropists who believed that these races could be raised to standards of education and conduct which would place them alongside Europeans. Members of this group tended to be Nonconformists, middle-class, and Liberal or Radical in their politics. Their opponents were largely Anglicans with aristocratic or gentry backgrounds and Whig or Tory sympathies, although this was a period when party labels mattered far less than they did later.