The Continuing Imperialism of Free Trade

Developments, Trends and the Role of Supranational Agents

Jo Grady, Chris Grocott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367585273
• eBook ISBN: 9781351402347
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Business

In 1953, John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson shook the foundations of imperial history with their essay ' The Imperialism of Free Trade'. They reshaped how historians saw the British empire, focussing not on the 'red bits on the map' and the wishes of policy makers in London, but rather on British economic and political influence globally. Expanding on this analysis, this volume provides an examination of imperialism which brings the reader right up to the present.

This book offers an innovative assessment and analysis of the history and contemporary status of imperial control. It does so in four parts, examining the historical emergence and traditions of imperialism; the relationships between the periphery and the metropolitan; the role of supranational agencies in the extension of imperial control; and how these connect to financialisation and international political economy. The book provides a dynamic and unique perspective on imperialism by bringing together a range of contributors – both established and up-and-coming scholars, activists, and those from industry – from a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds. In providing these authors a space to apply their insights, this engaging volume sheds light on the practical implications of imperialism for the contemporary world.

With a broad chronological and geographical sweep, this book provides theoretical and empirical engagements with the nature of imperialism and its effects upon societies. It will be of great interest to a broad range of disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, especially those working in History, Politics, and Management and Organisation Studies.

Part I

The imperialism of free trade in historical context

Overview

In this first section we examine three historical examples of the imperialism of free trade at work. In chapters 1 and 2 James Fargher and Nick Sharman focus upon the British example, with Fargher examining formal interventions in Sudan designed to protect Britain’s global trade, whilst Nick Sharman looks at the ways in which British investment and government policy towards Spain served to reconfigure the Spanish economy and political scene to the advantage of British capital. In both cases, British policy objectives were achieved. After a brief formal intervention, the Sudan remained part of the British informal empire and key to keeping open the short sea route to India. In Spain, access to mining concessions such as the Rio Tinto and the breaking down of Spanish monopolies on goods such as cotton manufactures proved lucrative for British capital. Adam Burns (in chapter 3) takes up the use of formal and informal means but, instead of examining Britain, looks to the relationship between the United States of America and Cuba since the latter was prised away from the Spanish Empire in 1898. Burns demonstrates neatly the ways in which, before the Cuban Revolution, the United States was able to exert its will over Cuba’s elites, removing difficult political factions from power whenever trade with the United States was threatened and installing new collaborators through constitutional and occasionally military means. Access to constitutional methods of altering the Cuban government ended after the Cuban Revolution and the rise to power of Fidel Castro, and the full weight of US informal imperial power was brought to bear on Cuba – interestingly to no avail. Here we look at each chapter in greater detail.

Gladstone, Suakin and the imperialism of British liberalism

James Fargher explores the ways in which formal intervention in the Sudan was necessary to secure Britain’s wider network of strategic bases and infrastructure which provided security to the British Royal and merchant navies – the lifeblood of both formal and informal empire. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, various territories in the north and the east of the African continent became more important to British interests. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 provided a short sea route to India as well as to British colonies and trading partners in the Far East and Australasia. In Egypt and the Sudan (which was claimed as one of Egypt’s territories), informal control was essential to maintaining the neutrality of the Suez Canal zone. Egypt remained an independent state but nevertheless was designated as a British protectorate, with British military and financial officials ‘advising’ the Egyptian government. A force of British troops was in place in the canal zone to ensure the area’s neutrality. Thus, when a series of uprisings against the Egyptian government threatened the coast around the canal sea route, British firms lobbied the British government for formal intervention. Fargher examines how this was carried out in two interventions in 1884 and 1885.

Spain and Britain’s informal empire

In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain, Nick Sharman traces the exertion of informal imperialism over various successive Spanish governments by Britain. Much as with Gallagher and Robinson’s example of Argentina, British ownership of key infrastructure in Spain gave it considerable leverage over the Spanish government. This leverage was used in two ways. First, strategic advantage. Spain guarded the western Mediterranean and could pose a threat to the naval base and fortress at Gibraltar, a particular concern after the opening of the Suez Canal made Mediterranean trade and access more significant in Britain’s commercial interests. Keeping Spain neutral and preventing other European powers from exerting influence on Spain or its North African colonies was therefore vital. Second, Spain was a notably protectionist economy in the nineteenth century with a number of state monopolies protecting sizable industries such as the trade in tobacco and cotton manufactures. In Spain, therefore, we see a classic case of not so much the imperialism of free trade but imperialism for free trade. Substantial investments in Spanish industries such as mining increasingly forced the Spanish government to consider British interests in Spain. In addition, as Sharman analyses, the British government worked with economic and political liberals to press its vision of free trade at the expense of Spanish conservatives who realised that the opening up of Spain to British trade would be at the expense of the old order. With very little having been written about Britain’s informal imperialism in Spain, Sharman’s chapter provides an insight into British imperial tactics contiguous with examples cited by Gallagher and Robinson.

Economic imperialism in Cuba, 1898–2017: Hegemony and embargo

The Spanish formal empire in Cuba was deprived to them in 1898 as a result of the Spanish-American War, during which the United States annexed Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Cuba was a significant loss to the Spanish economy because it had provided a ready outlet for Catalan textile manufactures. The weakening of the Catalan textile industry benefitted British textile exports, as Sharman demonstrates. Adam Burns picks up the story by examining the interactions of the United States with Cuba from the point of annexation. Having annexed Cuba, Burns examines the way in which the US government set about establishing a constitution for the island that suited US interests. Despite a reasonably brisk move to informal control, established by independence in 1920, the Cuban constitution contained a clause which allowed the United States the legal right to use military force to impose its will upon the Cuban government. Burns examines several of the occasions on which this was done, in every case the intention being to ensure US economic interests on the island. However, as Burns examines, the wantonly one-sided arrangement of the US-Cuban relationship bred such a degree of hostility against the United States that collaboration completely collapsed in Cuba. The Cuban Revolution, and Fidel Castro’s accession to power in 1959, saw the expulsion or flight of economic and political elites who had collaborated with the United States and the installation of a government as hostile to the United States as the United States was to it. Informal attempts at control followed (with formal attempts having been hopelessly foiled by the Bay of Pigs incident). Yet, the cast-iron resolve of the Cuban government to resist the United States, combined with assistance from the Soviet Union, meant that the United States was unable to get any purchase in Cuba. As we will see throughout this volume, informal means often require a crack in a country’s economic life into which a wedge can be driven. The example of Greek debt provides a good example of this in Part 3. Yet in Cuba, the refusal to be drawn into the US economic orbit, combined with a counterproductive blockade, gives us the opportunity to explore the failure of an economic superpower to successfully exert informal imperial control.

1 Gladstone, Suakin and the imperialism of British liberalism

James Fargher

Introduction

In 1884 and 1885, two British military expeditions were sent to Suakin, an ancient port city on the Red Sea in the eastern Sudan, to prevent it from falling to an Islamist insurgency. This chapter explores the significance of these expeditions, which were launched as part of a nascent strategy to uphold British global commercial and naval dominance in the face of rising challenges from imperial rivals. Lacking the natural resources, populations and industrial potential of the United States, imperial Germany and the Russian Empire, by the 1880s Britain began to face the prospect of permanent second-class status. To avoid this fate and to buttress Britain’s position as a world power, strategists sought to integrate her scattered overseas possessions into a united, federal empire.

This sea-based imperium would be welded together along sea lines of communication acting as a nervous system along which would flow the vast British mercantile fleet as well as instant communications through the undersea telegraph cable network, the most important branch of which ran through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea. After its opening in 1869, the Suez Canal rapidly became vital for British trade and, more importantly, for telegraphic communication between London, Aden, South Africa, India and Australasia. In order to achieve the objective of fusing the British colonies into a true empire, Britain needed to ensure that the steamship and undersea telegraph routes connecting the principal territories could never be interrupted by a foreign power.

The Suakin expeditions were launched in order to protect the British Empire’s most important sea line of communication at its most vulnerable point. Moreover, they were supported by influential commercial firms which were contracted by the British government to facilitate inter-imperial shipping and communication. Directors on the boards of firms such as the Eastern Telegraph Company were eager to protect their profits in the Red Sea and, as members of Britain’s political elite, were also invested politically in the new imperial project.

Only by examining the Suakin expeditions from the context of oceanic imperial defence can these two military campaigns be fully understood. Though the British government and its corporate partners were ever eager to minimise costs by operating abroad indirectly through local actors, the military interventions at Suakin demonstrated that Britain was willing to resort to more formal means of control if her strategic and commercial interests were threatened.

Historical context

Egyptian colonial rule over Sudan began in 1820 with an invasion led by the Khedive Muhammed Ali, but until 1867 its rule remained limited to the central Nile Valley (Daly and Holt, 2000: 41). In 1865, Ali’s successor, the Khedive Ismail, successfully persuaded his overlord, the Ottoman Sultan Abdülaziz, to devolve control over the two ancient Sudanese ports of Suakin and Massawa and the territory surrounding them to Egypt (Talhami, 1979: 236). Ismail had recognised that the Suez Canal, then under construction and due to open in 1869, would transform the backwater Red Sea into one of the world’s great trade routes, and he was determined to lay claim to the small handful of ports between Suez and the Indian Ocean (Hill, 1959: 141).

Ismail’s pursuit of an empire in central Africa combined with his lavish spending on domestic projects proved ruinously expensive. In addition to taking on huge debts from European creditors, Ismail financed his political development by imposing heavy taxes on his colonial territories (Theobald, 1951: 26). An ill-judged invasion of the ancient Christian empire of Ethiopia in 1874 increased Ismail’s expenses still further and weakened his hold over Sudan when his troops were repeatedly routed by the Ethiopians. In Sudan, the combination of high taxes, Ismail’s decision to outlaw slavery in 1877 and his ostentatious use of Christian European officers as provincial governors caused widespread resentment against Egyptian rule, which was supported only by a dwindling number of isolated garrisons (Theobald, 1951: 26).

By 1879, Ismail was so heavily in debt that his European creditors, principally British and French, effectively controlled the country’s finances, and they used their influence to impose unpopular political reforms. An army revolt broke out, led by Colonel Ahmed Arabi. Despite pressure from London and Paris, Ismail was either unwilling or unable to quell the insurrection. The exasperated British and French governments subsequently deposed Ismail and replaced him with his young son Tewfik. This did nothing to quash the nationalist rebellion led by Arabi, who remained Egypt’s de facto ruler until a British ‘army of occupation’ led by Sir Garnet Wolseley crushed the rebellious Egyptian forces at the Battle of Tel-el-Kebir in 1882 and occupied Cairo. Not only did Wolseley’s victory signal an end to Egyptian independence, but it also placed Egypt within Britain’s sphere of influence – at the expense of France.

Revolt in Sudan

Political paralysis in Egypt caused by the failed Arabi revolt combined with long-standing popular resentment towards Egyptian rule created an explosive atmosphere in colonial Sudan (Daly and Holt, 2000: 76). In 1881, a young Sufi sheikh, Muhammed Ahmed, declared to his followers that he was the Mahdi (the Expected Guide) who, according to Islamic scripture, would return at the end of time to establish an earthly kingdom in preparation for the Day of Judgement (Theobald, 1951: 32). Respected for his reputation for piety,¹ by 1881 Ahmed had gathered a small band of disciples and felt confident enough to call on his supporters to rise up in revolt against Egyptian rule, promising to replace the tottering colonial administration with a militant theocracy.²

The colonial government unsuccessfully attempted to arrest the Mahdi and his followers. Evading capture, he established a camp in the Nuba Mountains and began rallying the Sudanese to his cause.³ By 1882, he had acquired an army sufficient to lay siege to the city of El Obeid in Kordofan province, severing the line of communication between Khartoum and the remote garrisons in Darfur (Theobald, 1951: 43). By the time the city had fallen to the Mahdi in early 1883, he had succeeded in establishing his own proto-state capable of seriously challenging Egyptian rule over Sudan (Ohrwalder, 1892: 52).

Amongst those who were persuaded by his victories to join the Mahdi’s cause was a former slave-dealer from Suakin, Osman Digna. Appointed Emir of the East by the Mahdi, his orders were to cut the Egyptian government’s main supply route, which ran between the port of Suakin and through the Red Sea hills to the Nile (Serels, 2013: 54). Digna duly returned to his native Red Sea Hills, and by the autumn of 1883 he had raised an insurgent army in the mountains, which he used to attack and besiege key towns along the Suakin-Nile road. Columns of government troops sent from Suakin to relieve these isolated posts were relentlessly ambushed and destroyed.⁴ In December 1883, Digna’s troops had reached the outskirts of Suakin itself (Talhami, 1979: 192). Cut off from Darfur and from its regular line of communication to the sea, Khartoum appeared increasingly isolated.

Reaction in Britain

Prime Minister William Gladstone already opposed Egyptian rule over Sudan on both economic and ideological grounds,⁵ but Suakin proved to be a different matter. The advance of Osman Digna’s forces on the port through the autumn of 1883 had already caused concern in London, and military officers warned that if the Egyptian ports – Suakin, Massawa and the Somali towns of Berbera and Zeyla – fell, the French or the Italians could easily capture them and turn them into naval bases.⁶ In response, gunboats from the Royal Navy were deployed to Suakin to boost the town’s defences, but the situation continued to deteriorate.⁷ Secretary of State for War Lord Hartington announced to the cabinet that if held by a hostile power, Suakin would pose a direct threat to the security of communications with India (Robinson and Gallagher, 1981: 133).

Nevertheless, in 1883 the Liberal government remained reluctant to send troops to the eastern Sudan.⁸ The presence of warships alone, it was hoped, would act as a sufficient deterrent to shore up Egypt’s eroding control over the Red Sea coast.⁹ Gladstone aimed to induce the Sublime Porte to send troops to prevent the area from falling under Mahdist control even as the Egyptians continued to evacuate their own troops from Sudan (Gladstone, 1990: 94). Despite its insistence on the Egyptian evacuation, the government confirmed that it would continue ‘to protect the ports of the Red Sea’.¹⁰

This cautious policy was upended in February 1884 when Valentine Baker, a disgraced former cavalry officer who was now serving in the khedive’s army, led 4,000 Egyptian troops into a disastrous defeat at the hands of the Mahdists outside Suakin. The blow crushed all hopes of extinguishing the rebellion in eastern Sudan (Burleigh, 1884: 15) and raised a storm of protest in Britain, with both the press and Parliament calling on the government to avenge this defeat (Glasgow Herald, 1884).

The Cabinet came under renewed pressure to send troops. Although Gladstone was extremely reluctant to do so, the War Office, the Admiralty and the India Office formed a powerful faction pushing for action. Hartington requested a special meeting of the Cabinet on 8 February 1884 to discuss the possibility of deploying troops to Suakin,¹¹ during which the War Office (Buckle, 1928: 477) and the Admiralty presented arguments in favour of establishing British military garrisons in the Red Sea ports.¹² Hartington and the Earl of Northbrook, First Lord of the Admiralty, also persuaded Gladstone to telegraph General Charles Gordon for his expert opinion on the matter.¹³ Gordon had famously been sent to Khartoum in January 1884 as Governor-General to oversee the evacuation of Sudan (Davenport-Hines, 2004). However, there is some evidence to suggest that Gordon never intended to evacuate Khartoum at all (Vetch, 1901: 257), and he telegraphed back his support for the intervention.¹⁴

Buried under the weight of these arguments and faced with further news of Mahdist advances towards Suakin (Colvile, 1996[1889]: 21), Gladstone conceded. Four thousand troops embarked for Suakin, with instructions to ‘tak[e] any measures necessary for defence of ports’.¹⁵ Less than a month after Baker’s defeat, on 22 February 1884, this force under the command of General Sir Gerald Graham appeared off the eastern Sudanese coastline (ibid.: 22).

The expeditions

At first glance, it would appear that the Suakin expeditions were tactical victories but strategic failures. Neither accomplished their publicly announced intention of destroying the Mahdist insurgency in the eastern Sudan, and both were withdrawn after several months in the field. More importantly though, the expeditions did succeed in preventing the port of Suakin from falling into Mahdist hands.

1884

The first Suakin expedition lasted from February to April 1884. Shortly after landing in the port, General Graham and his 4,000 Regulars marched on El Teb, where the infantry squares drove Osman Digna’s fighters from dug-in positions with artillery and machine-gun fire (Burleigh, 1884: 49). Further battles between the British and the Sudanese over the next few months went much the same way, with superior British firepower overcoming the ‘human wave’ assaults launched by Digna’s spearmen. Alarmed at the scale of the conflict, Gladstone soon decided to recall the expedition in early April. As he argued to the Cabinet, Britain was positioning itself to occupy eastern Sudan permanently, despite having no legal claim to the territory.¹⁶

This had become...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: the continuing imperialism of free trade
• PART I: The imperialism of free trade in historical context
• PART II: Periphery-metropolitan relationships
• PART III: Supranational agents of imperialism
• PART IV: The continuing imperialism of free trade
• References
• Index