The Transformation of the World (100 page)

Costs and Benefits of the British Empire

In the second half of the 1980s, there was a dispute among historians over whether the British Empire had been “worth it.” A group of American researchers, with a major empirical input, came to the conclusion that it had ultimately
been a huge waste of money.
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This was supposed to fatally undermine Marxist theses that British capitalism had expanded out of objective necessity, that the empire had been exploited on a massive scale, and so on. With the debate now over, it is possible to reach a more finely nuanced judgment. The first point to be made is that on longer time scales the empire was undoubtedly profitable for a large number of firms, and even for whole sectors of the economy. It allowed privatization of profits with a socialization of costs. Individual businesses could make a lot of money: one would have to look at their archives to ascertain how much. Since the British national economy was the only one in the world for which overseas trade had central importance, global commercial and financial relations played a greater role in defining its relative position than they did for any other European country. With the exception of India, however, such relations with the so-called dependent empire were far less important than economic links with continental Europe, the United States, and the dominions. In short, Britain made use of the empire without being dependent on it. A cross-check for this premise is that when decolonization began in 1947 with Indian independence, it had surprisingly few negative consequences for the British national economy.

If we narrow the question down to India, by far the largest colony, then the results are fairly unequivocal. By virtue of a well-organized colonial tax system, India in the long term covered the costs of the British administrative and military apparatus out of its own resources. Since political measures ensured that the Indian market remained open to certain British exports, and since India ran a long-term trade deficit that greatly contributed to the British balance of payments, the jewel in the imperial crown was anything but a loss-making enterprise during the half century before 1914.
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If we look a little beyond cost-benefit accounting, three further points appear more important.

1. Even if it is true that large sections of the British population gained little from the empire, millions were “proud of it” and consumed it as a status good. People reveled in the imperial pomp, even when the point of it was to impress them rather than the “natives.”
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2. The empire created numerous job opportunities, especially in the armed forces. More important, however, was the scope that it opened up for emigration, which, economically speaking, afforded a more productive deployment of labor than in the home country, while politically it represented a safety valve for the outward channeling of social pressures. This effect was rarely a simple question of manipulation, however. Emigration was in most cases a personal decision: the empire created options.

3. The empire made it possible to conduct what (from the British point of view) was a highly rational foreign policy. It reinforced the advantage of an island position: namely, that one is not tied by nature to others that one would not choose to have as neighbors.

Britain had more leeway than any other great power when it came to policymaking: it could forge new ties if it wished, but it could also hold itself aloof. The United Kingdom had few friends in international politics, but it did not need to. It could therefore avoid being drawn into possibly fatal obligations. This low-commitment policy of managing all kinds of distance was practiced by all British governments in the nineteenth century, regardless of their party composition. But if a diplomatic understanding was reached with another power (the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1902, the Entente Cordiale with France in 1904, the Anglo-Russian Convention in 1907), it was never formulated in such a way as to entail automatic partnership in case of war. If the empire joined the First World War—it was declared on August 4, 1914, in the name of the
whole
empire—this was not because of an inescapable alliance mechanism but because Whitehall decided that it should be so. The possession of the empire meant that splendid isolation—which could function, however, only with a balance of power on the Continent—was one convenient policy option. The resources of empire were always available, and British policy was always pragmatic enough to keep open the possibility of a new orientation. At the beginning of the First World War, then, Britain was
not
isolated. The empire only really displayed its incomparable value in the years between 1914 and 1918.
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One does not have to be an apologist of imperialism to admit that the British Empire was a success by the standards of nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperial history. It survived the world crisis of the period between early modernity and the modern age (Koselleck's
Sattelzeit
), which witnessed the shipwreck of many another empire. It also pulled through a few dramatic setbacks. No major territory that came under British control was lost until the Second World War. (This is why the fall of Singapore to the Japanese army in February 1942 was such a devastating blow.) Retreats from unsustainable forward positions served to round out the contours of the empire. Thus, in 1904 an expeditionary force sent out from India under Sir Francis Younghusband advanced as far as Lhasa and, having failed to find suspected “Russian weapons,” concluded an agreement for a protectorate in Tibet, a land over which China upheld vague suzerainty claims without being able to back them up at the level of power politics. The driving force behind this adventurist action was Lord Curzon, the ambitious viceroy of India. But London saw no reason to incur even minimal obligations to such an economically and strategically unimportant country, and so it disowned the local success achieved by Younghusband, this quintessential man on the spot.
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The British political class was also very successful in adapting to changed external conditions, when new Great Powers became active in the last third of the nineteenth century and Britain's comparative economic situation worsened as a result. It is true that Britain did not retain its global hegemony (i.e., a position whereby nothing really important happened against the wishes of the British Empire), but once again, with some difficulty, policymakers found a middle course between defense of the status quo and utilization of new economic and
territorial opportunities.
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In the course of the long nineteenth century, the British Empire displayed several different faces and passed through a number of metamorphoses. Yet it remained the most successful empire of the age and, after the First World War, even managed to extend its control over some League of Nations “mandates” (Iraq, Jordan, Palestine).

Factors of Stability

In addition to those already mentioned, a number of other factors explain this relative success.

First
. As A. G. Hopkins and Peter Cain have shown, the main impetus for British expansion came not from industrialists but from a London-based financial sector closely linked to big agrarian interests looking to modernize their operations. The city was the home of the world's most influential banks and largest insurance companies. It financed the shipping and foreign trade of every nation. It was the focal point of the international business in private fixed incomes. Anyone who wished to invest in China, Argentina, or the Ottoman Empire used the financial services of the Square Mile. The pound sterling was the major world currency, and the mechanisms of the gold standard were kept going mainly from London. In comparison with industry, finance has the advantage of being less location dependent; it is therefore also less “national.” Money from all over the world converged in the British capital, and so the city was not merely the economic center of the formal colonial empire, or even of the much larger sphere in which Britain exercised political influence. It was a global control center for flows of money and commodities, without rival until the rise of New York.
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Second
. In the course of time—and having learned the lesson of disastrous blunders made during the American crisis of the 1770s—the managers of the British Empire developed and repeatedly put to the test a highly refined set of policy instruments. The basic principle of interventionism, in an age when the word “intervention” had fewer negative connotations than it does today,
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was to use one's assets in the optimum manner. This is not self-evident in relation to empires, as we can see from the tendency of the United States in the twentieth century to deploy massive military force at an early stage. The British Empire always tried to keep this in reserve, developing an extraordinary virtuosity in the gradation of threats. British diplomats and army men were past masters in the art of persuasion and pressure, and so long as these could achieve the desired objective there was no need to resort to more expensive methods. One especially effective idea was to coordinate the application of pressure with a third power, preferably France; this was done in 1857 against Tunisia and in 1858–60 against China, while Siam was a touch more successful in playing off Europeans against one another.
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British policy followed the principle that influence should be exerted for as long as possible and formal colonial rule be introduced only after the exhaustion of such informal options. A setup much favored by British imperialists involved the discreet presence of “residents” and other advisers to guide
compliant local rulers. This could even result in an outright fiction. For example, Egypt after 1882 was for all intents and purposes a British colony, but the nominal suzerainty of the sultan in Istanbul was never actually disputed until 1914, and throughout the period in question an indigenous monarch sat on the throne and an indigenous prime minister remained in office. The all-powerful representative of Great Britain, who gave the government its instructions, bore the modest title of consul-general and had no formal attributes of sovereignty. In practice, this veiled protectorate allowed for measures no less drastic than in an autocratically governed crown colony.
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Third
. The whole aristocratic stamp of British politics in the nineteenth century, so different from the bourgeois style prevalent in France, made it easy to practice elite solidarity across cultural boundaries. And, more than in the French case, the imperial apparatus incorporated subordinate local elites, albeit often only symbolically.
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Fourth
. The British imperial class, especially toward the end of the nineteenth century, was no less racist in its attitudes than other European or North American colonial masters. It strongly emphasized social difference between people who did not have the same skin color. However, elite racism was virtually never taken to exterminist extremes; that was reserved for settlers—in Australia, for example—confirming James Belich's general observation that “Settlement colonies were usually more dangerous for indigenous peoples than subject colonies.”
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Uprisings such as the Indian “Mutiny” of 1857/58 might be brutally suppressed, and racism would then shed many inhibitions, but genocide or mass murder was never used as an instrument of rule in the British Empire, as it was in King Leopold's Congo or German South West Africa in 1904–8. A critical moment was the so-called Governor Eyre controversy. When Jamaicans in October 1865 resisted the colonial police during legal proceedings in the small town of Morant Bay, a protest action by small farmers led to the killing of a number of whites. Driven by paranoid fears of a “second Haiti,” Governor Edward Eyre deployed a huge machinery of repressive “pacification,” which in a few weeks left some 500 Jamaicans dead; many more were publicly whipped or tortured in other ways, and a thousand houses were burned to the ground. This reign of terror gave rise to a controversy in Britain that lasted nearly three years. The issue was whether Governor Eyre should be celebrated as a hero who had saved Jamaica for the Crown and prevented the massacre of whites on the island, or whether he was an incompetent murderer who had failed in his duties. Scarcely any other debate stirred and divided the Victorian public so deeply. The country's most prominent intellectuals took sides: Thomas Carlyle defended the governor with a racist diatribe; John Stuart Mill led the party of liberal opponents calling for a harsh punishment. Although the affair ended with a resounding victory for the liberals, Edward Eyre was not punished but merely dismissed from the colonial service; in the end he even received, however reluctantly, a pension awarded to him by Parliament.
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And yet 1865 was a milestone in the struggle against racism, comparable to the epochal decision of 1807 to abolish the slave trade. The vigilance of public opinion never flagged, and the foulest pages in the black book of colonialism were subsequently filled by nations other than the British.
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When racism began to take extreme forms in Germany and Italy after the First World War (and especially in the 1930s), it had already ceased to be generally acceptable in British polite conversation. Race was not ignored, but discrimination in the colonies as well as in the British Isles did not result in state crimes.

So, what was Pax Britannica—from today's
analytical
vantage, not in the rhetoric of the time?
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It is all too easy to say what it was not. Unlike the Imperium Romanum or the eighteenth-century Sino-Manchurian empire, the British Empire did not encompass a whole world civilization, an
orbis terrarum
. On no continent other than Australasia did Britain possess an undisputed imperial monopoly; everywhere and at every moment it was embroiled in rivalry with other powers. Its imperium was not a homogeneous territorial bloc but a complex network of global power, a structure with knotty bulges and uncontrolled spaces. Unlike the United States in the post-1945 Pax Americana, which had the technical means to reduce any corner of the planet to ruins, Britain in the nineteenth century did not have the military capacity to bring each and every land mass under its control. An intervention to save the Hungarian revolutionaries in 1849, though fervently demanded by sections of the British public, was scarcely feasible. Britain might appear in some measure as a gendarme of the seas, but not as a true global policeman.