Britain and Empire, 1880-1945

Dane Kennedy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317876229
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Britain and Empire, 1880-1945 traces the relationship between Britain and its empire during a period when the two spheres intersected with one another to an unprecedented degree. The story starts with the imperial expansion of the late nineteenth century and ends with the Second World War, at the end of which Britain was on the brink of decolonisation.

The author shows how empire came to figure into almost every important development that marked Britain¿s response to the upheavals of the late nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century. He examines its influence on foreign policy, party politics, social reforms, cultural practices, and national identity. At the same time, he shows how domestic developments affected imperial policies.

Written in an engaging and accessible manner, this book:

integrates British and imperial history in a single narrative
provides a useful synthesis of recent historical research in the area
analyses topics ranging from ideology and culture to politics and foreign affairs
contains a chronology, glossary, who¿s who and guide to further reading

Britain and Empire, 1880-1945 provides an up-to-date, accessible survey, ideal for students coming to the subject for the first time.

Part One

Introduction

Chapter One

Background and Context

Perhaps the most paradoxical feature of modern British history is that the British Empire reached its zenith as British economic and military power went into retreat. Starting with the scramble for Africa in the late nineteenth century, those parts of the map painted a British red spread at an unprecedented rate, culminating in the great tracts of Middle Eastern and African territory claimed as the spoils of the First World War. Despite some concessions to subject peoples, the British retained their vast empire to the outbreak of the Second World War, and, excepting the East Asian territories captured by Japan, through to its conclusion. Over this same period, however, Britain’s economic and military might experienced a distinct decline relative to other powers. Its mid-nineteenth-century pre-eminence as ‘the workshop of the world’ came under challenge in the closing decades of the century from newly industrialised countries like Germany and the United States of America and the naval power that underwrote its trading supremacy was likewise undermined by these rivals. The First World War’s devastating drain of resources left Britain seriously weakened, and the global conflict that broke out in 1939 furthered its contraction to a second-tier power.

How can we reconcile these seemingly contradictory developments? How was it possible for Britain to extend its empire and enforce its authority over hundreds of millions of peoples at the same time that its economic and political claims to world power were becoming increasingly fragile? In wrestling with these questions, it is helpful to glance backwards over the course of Britain’s imperial experience with an eye to broad patterns. The greatest burst of expansion prior to the late nineteenth century occurred in the long eighteenth century, as the newly established United Kingdom (incorporating England, Scotland, Wales, and eventually Ireland into a single British state) undertook a series of wars against its European rivals, including the Dutch, the Spanish, and especially the French. By the time the last of these wars came to a close on the battlefield of Waterloo, Britain possessed an empire that extended across the world’s oceans, binding Canada, the Caribbean, South Africa, India, Australia, and innumerable other lands to a London-based political and economic system. With no serious challengers to their global position after 1815, the British felt far less compulsion to lay claim to further overseas territory. Their interests were often enough served through the independent enterprise of manufacturers, merchants and bankers, whose success in dominating international markets was evidence of the triumph of the new industrial capitalism that was reshaping Britain itself. The result was the growth of what historians have termed the ‘informal empire’, extending to decaying old dynasties like Qing China and the Ottoman Empire and unstable new countries like the Latin American republics. These states, while retaining some semblance of political autonomy, lacked the strength to resist Britain’s economic encroachments: when they tried, the British government was quite prepared to employ ‘gunboat diplomacy’ to protect the interests of its traders. The formal empire did, to be sure, continue to expand in the early and mid-Victorian years, but it did so in a fitful manner that was driven more often by pressures on the colonial frontier than by policies in the imperial metropolis. Within Britain, the dominant response was disinterest, while an active hostility to empire, rooted in the liberal conviction that it encouraged authoritarian, protectionist policies, was as prevalent as any imperial enthusiasm. Thus, the empire’s return to a prominent place in the preoccupations of Britain’s policy makers and the consciousness of its public towards the end of the nineteenth century marked a significant departure from the trends that had dominated the preceding era.

What this brief overview suggests is that the most aggressively expansionist periods in British history occurred when British power confronted serious challenges from rival states, not when it stood supreme in world affairs. Unable to rely on informal influence in the face of competition, the British sought to bolster their uncertain international position through exclusive claims to colonial territory. These efforts eventuated in triumph at the end of the long eighteenth century; the new era of imperialism that began around 1880 brought a very different outcome. The exponents of empire, however, were by no means aware that their cause would end as it did, and we would do well to resist the temptations of hindsight, with its tincture of inevitability.

When Britain entered the era of heightened imperial activity that extended from the scramble for Africa through to the Second World War, the course it charted was influenced by a variety of currents, many of them rapidly changing and highly unpredictable. The international environment that had favoured British interests in the middle decades of the nineteenth century was profoundly altered towards its end by the growing political power of two traditional rivals, France and Russia, and two new challengers, the United States and Germany. The latter state, in particular, complicated the diplomatic calculus for Britain, but all presented new or intensified threats to its strategic position around the globe. Moreover, the rapid industrialisation of Germany, the United States and France made their economies increasingly fierce competitors in markets that British manufacturers had comfortably claimed as their own earlier in the century: even Lilliputian Belgium established a steel industry that set Birmingham on its heels. It was agriculture, however, that was the first to feel the full brunt of competition. The global spread of cheap and reliable railway and shipping systems allowed North American grain, Argentine beef, New Zealand butter, and various other agricultural goods to flood the British market, causing commodity prices and land values to plummet. The trade slump that began in 1873 and continued with a few brief interruptions for the next twenty years seemed to many Britons a harbinger of things to come. Empire, or more particularly a politically and economically integrated imperial system that promised shelter from such unwelcome international trends, was regarded with renewed interest.

Britain’s turn to a more consciously imperialist course was also shaped by a number of domestic developments. Doubtless the most momentous was the transition to democratic politics. The enfranchisement of most urban working-class males in 1867, followed by their rural counterparts in 1884, transformed the nature of British politics towards the end of the century. Although William Gladstone is credited with making the first direct appeal to a mass electorate, his political opponents soon learned that they could mobilise popular support by fostering nationalist pride, which was invariably associated with the assertion of British power abroad, particularly when it inspired individual acts of heroism in colonial campaigns. Underwriting the rise of the new imperial politics were the public rituals of a resurgent monarchy, the jingoistic enthusiasms of the popular press and the music halls, and the racialist attitudes that percolated up from various sources. Social Darwinism soon supplied a scientifically sanctioned doctrine that legitimated the imperialist world-view, with its implicit understanding of the international scene as an unforgiving struggle for survival that pitted nation against nation, race against race. It also posed disturbing questions about whether the British were prepared for this struggle and proposed sweeping measures to make them so. An important consequence of these varied developments would be the radical transformation of the role of government in the social and economic life of its citizens, a transformation that has been characterised by some historians as the creation of a social imperial state. While social imperialism’s agenda was never fully realised, it made sufficient inroads to substantiate the importance of empire within Britain itself.

The purpose of this volume, then, is to trace the relationship between Britain and its empire in the period when the two were bound together in an intimate embrace. By writing what in effect is an imperial history of Britain, I am drawing on insights and inspiration from a growing array of scholars who have sought to show how integral the empire was to the British experience. The past half dozen years or so have brought an especially abundant harvest of research offering empirical evidence of and theoretical perspectives on the connections between Britain and its empire (e.g., Burton, 1994, 1998; Bush, 1999; Cannadine, 2001; Lahiri, 2000; Parsons, 1998; Schneer, 1999; Tabili, 1994; Thompson, 2000). For all their claims to originality, however, these studies follow in the wake of several earlier waves of enquiry that made important advances in our understanding of imperial Britain, most notably the valuable work published in the 1960s on British imperial ideology (e.g., Koebner and Schmidt, 1964; Porter, 1968; Semmel, 1968; Thornton, 1968) and the influential studies of imperialism and popular culture by John MacKenzie and others in the 1980s (e.g., August, 1985; MacKenzie, 1984, 1986; Mangan, 1986; Rich, 1986; Rosenthal, 1986). Nor can we neglect the information and insights to be garnered from the two historiographical traditions that the preceding scholarship has sought to bridge and transcend – an imperial one that has concerned itself mainly with Britain’s impact on its overseas possessions and a national one that has concerned itself mainly with Britain’s internal social and political developments. The purpose of this volume is to provide a brief and suggestive synthesis that signals some of the themes this rich and varied literature has shown shaped Britain at the height of empire.

Part Two

Analysis

Chapter Two

Imperial Expansion and National Foreboding, 1880–1900

For the British people and their leaders, imperialism acquired a new importance – and a new meaning – in the late nineteenth century. Hitherto associated in the minds of most Victorians with the military adventurism of continental despots like Napoleon, the term took on more positive connotations in public discourse as various forces combined to cause the British to rethink who they were and where they stood in the world (Koebner and Schmidt, 1964). These forces ranged from the foreign economic and military threats posed by aggressive rivals like the newly industrialised United States and the newly unified Germany to the domestic political and social demands made by subordinate groups like newly enfranchised working-class men and newly assertive middle-class women. All of them were set in a context that construed imperialism as an enterprise that could check their potentially destabilising effects or divert them into more beneficial channels. Although the British Empire already existed as a global system, during this period it expanded at an unmatched speed, incorporating large tracts of territory in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and it assumed an unprecedented place in the national consciousness, altering the very meaning of what it meant to be British. In consequence, the boundaries between the international and the domestic spheres – or, more precisely, between empire and nation – began to blur.

The Politics of Imperialism

The fall of the Conservative government in 1880 appeared to many a repudiation of Benjamin Disraeli’s forward foreign policy, with its appeal to national pride and assertion of imperial power. Certainly the Liberal leader, William Gladstone, thought so. His acclaimed Midlothian campaigns of 1879–80 mobilised public opinion in opposition to Disraeli’s handling of the ‘Eastern Question’, which had placed Britain’s strategic interest in maintaining an Ottoman buffer against Russian expansion above the nation’s moral revulsion at the Ottoman massacre of Bulgarian Christians. Combined with the political embarrassment caused by setbacks in 1879 in Afghanistan, where a popular uprising forced a British occupying army into retreat, and Zululand in South Africa, where British forces were cut to pieces at the battle of Isandlwana, the public rejection of Disraeli’s Balkan strategy seemed to demonstrate the unpopularity of a foreign policy framed around the naked self-interests of the state. Gladstone came to office determined to reassert Britain’s claims to be a moral force in world affairs. Although this ambition carried more assertive implications than critics allowed when they charged Gladstone with isolationist or ‘Little Englander’ impulses, he was in principle antagonistic to any further additions to the imperial portfolio and eager to divest the nation of those recent acquisitions that he viewed as unwise and unethical investments (Shannon, 1976).

It is a measure of the sea-change in both the international and the domestic climate after 1880 that Gladstone so soon found himself obliged to abandon the precepts of his liberal conscience. The crisis came in Egypt, where the Khedive had spent his country into bankruptcy and dependency on Britain and France. When anti-Western nationalists overthrew him in 1882, the security of the Suez Canal and the interests of British investors (including Gladstone, whose portfolio was heavily laden with Egyptian stocks) seemed in jeopardy. Gladstone dispatched troops to restore the Khedive to power, but his action only underlined the point that this deposed and discredited ruler had become the puppet of the British, who found that if they wanted a government to safeguard their interests they would have to provide it themselves. Though the British were officially reluctant to acknowledge the fact, Egypt was entered into the imperial ledger (Robinson and Gallagher, 1968).

When Gladstone did swim against the tide of empire, he found it tough going. In South Africa, his decision to rescind the Conservative government’s annexation of the Transvaal came only after its Afrikaner burghers bloodied British troops at the battle of Majuba Hill in 1881, making the reversal in policy look suspiciously like surrender in the eyes of the public. He also ordered the evacuation of British-officered Egyptian garrisons from the Sudan, but failed to reckon with the messianic General Charles ‘Chinese’ Gordon, who dug in his heels at Khartoum, where he was soon besieged by Sudanese insurgents inspired by their own messianic leader, a Mahdi (Islamic prophet). Press coverage fanned public concern for Gordon’s fate, forcing Gladstone to send out a relief force to save him. It arrived too late: Gordon entered the pantheon of martyrs to the imperial cause, while Gladstone became its goat. Neither the withdrawal from the Sudan nor from the Transvaal would stick: by the end of the century, the British had reasserted their claims to both territories.

But the heaviest political price that Gladstone paid for his ambivalence about empire came in Ireland. Motivated in part by his need for the political support of Charles Stewart Parnell’s Irish Nationalist Party, but also by his growing conviction that the Irish problem was too deep-seated to be resolved any other way, Gladstone proposed home rule for Ireland in 1886. Ireland was not in any formal sense an imperial dependency: it had sent parliamentary representatives to Westminster since the 1801 Act of Union (though Catholics could not vote until 1829). But its standing in the United Kingdom had long been a subordinate one, as was evident from the economic power enjoyed by absentee landlords, the political power invested in the colonial-style Viceroy and, above all, the military power manifested in the huge number of troops garrisoned on the island. The troubled history of Ireland in the nineteenth century suggests that the Irish never reconciled themselves to their place in the United Kingdom in the manner exhibited by the Scots and the Welsh. Nor did the English show any sign of reconciling themselves to the Irish, at least if widespread representations of the latter as simian-like beasts are accurate measures of popular attitudes (Curtis, 1968). The reaction to Gladstone’s Home Rule bill seemed to confirm Ireland’s quasi-colonial status. The Conservatives were fiercely opposed, but in many respects the most damaging response came from within the Liberal Party itself. Joseph Chamberlain, one of the Liberals’ brightest lights, bolted from the Cabinet and the party, leading a rump group into secession as Liberal Unionists. Chamberlain’s quixotic career would take an increasingly imperial trajectory; Ireland was his launching pad (Boyce, 1996).

What makes Gladstone’s troubled ministry so instructive is that so many of its troubles arose out of its determination to tack against the wind of imperialism. When it ran aground on the rocks of Irish home rule, some of those left clinging to the wreckage began to reappraise the premises of their political creed. Liberalism seemed to them in sore need of reform, and although they remained adamant in their defence of free trade, they advocated a more active state than acknowledged by their Gladstonian heritage, a state that pursued social reforms at home and national interests abroad. In effect, they sought to accommodate themselves to the new imperial dispensation, as was evident by calling themselves Liberal Imperialists (Matthew, 1973).

The direct consequence of the Liberal débâcle, however, was the return to power of the Conservatives, who were less afflicted than their rivals by doubts and disagreements about the assertion of power abroad. They would hold office for all but three years over the next two decades, a period that saw the empire expand at an unprecedented rate. Though Lord Salisbury and his Conservative colleagues may have been more preoccupied with protecting what they had rather than pushing for more – they were ‘reluctant imperialists’ in the words of one historian (Lowe, 1967) – they were responsible nonetheless for one of the most remarkable periods of imperial expansion in Britain’s history.

The Scramble for Colonies

The bare facts of Britain’s imperial march across the globe in the late nineteenth century encourage a deceptively simple view of events, analogous to a championship chess match between the British grand master and its brash European challengers. Nationalist rivalries certainly played an important part in the drive to acquire colonial territory, but motives we...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Series
• Acknowledgement
• Chronology
• Maps
• Part One: Introduction
• Part Two: Analysis
• Part Three: Assessment
• Part Four: Documents
• Glossary
• Who’s Who
• Bibliography
• Index