Character, Ethics and Economics

British Debates on Empire, 1860-1914

Peter Cain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138071261
• eBook ISBN: 9781351628655
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

This book is an examination of the concept of 'character' as a moral marker in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its main purpose is to investigate how the 'character talk' that helped to shape elite Britons' sense of themselves was used at this time to convince audiences, both in Britain and in the places they had conquered, that empire could be morally as well as materially justified and was a great force for good in the world. A small group of radical thinkers questioned many of the arguments of the imperialists but found it difficult to escape entirely from the sense of moral superiority that marked the latter's language.

1 Character, virtue and British imperialism

Between 1870 and 1914 the area of the world under European imperial control increased dramatically. It was a period in which competition for empire, spurred by the rapid spread of modern industry and rising nationalist fervour, was accelerating and technological advances in the form of railways, steam shipping, improved military equipment, medical advances and the telegraph made it possible for Europeans to ‘be there’ in force.¹ The effect on Britain, the leading imperial power, was marked. In 1870, the British Empire was composed of the white settled colonies in Canada, Australasia and South Africa; India; the West Indies; and a wide scattering of coastal enclaves based on trade connexions together with a large number of naval stations dotted around the globe which were the foundation of the Pax Britannica. By 1914, the frontiers in the white-settled colonies had expanded significantly. A huge slice of Africa and a considerable portion of South Asia had also been added, partly to acquire new markets and defend older ones, but also because the pressure from their competitors sometimes provoked the British into extending their territory on strategic grounds.²

This rapid transformation inevitably generated anxieties about the future of Britain’s empire and Britain’s place in the world, and much recent scholarship has been focussed on the critique of expansion which began to appear in the press, the heavyweight journals read by the national elite and in Parliament in the 1870s. That critique was to culminate in the publication of Hobson’s classic Imperialism: a Study in 1902.³ On the other side, a great deal has been written about the economic, political and military motives that lay behind expansion at this time. What has been less evident, however, is any detailed account of the moral defence of empire mounted in these years and the highly distinctive language of ‘character’ in which it was articulated. This is the subject of this work which is focussed particularly on the defence of empire constructed by a powerful group of elite male imperialists who believed that the development and extension of the British empire had been a critical element in establishing Britain’s moral and material greatness and that its preservation would be equally vital to the nation’s survival as a great power in the twentieth century and beyond. At the core of this group were the outstanding rulers of empire, collectively known as the ‘proconsuls’, such as Lord Curzon, who inherited a peerage, and Lord Cromer (formerly Sir Evelyn Baring), Alfred Milner and Frederick Lugard⁴ who were all ennobled as a result of their imperial labours. They were supported in their views by the vast majority of the military and civilian servants of empire, and by many in the higher ranks of business and the professions.

In a very broad sense, all those discussed in these pages were liberals in that they believed strongly in the ‘liberties’ that had evolved in Britain – such as Parliamentary institutions, the independence of the judiciary from the executive, trial by jury – which they saw as both cause and effect of the high moral character of the British race and the foundation of its global success. It was, however, the Conservative party which emerged under Benjamin Disraeli’s leadership in the 1870s and which he saw as the defender of Britain’s traditional institutions like the established Anglican church, that gloried most in empire and in its supposed civilising mission as a key element in the nation’s moral development and as a main source of its strength. The party was, generally speaking, content to assume that despotic rule in Asia and Africa was compatible with Britain’s perceived global leadership in terms of liberty and constitutionalism. It also became the home to most of those who were passionate for some definite form of white empire unity and, as part of that, came to believe that the policy of free trade adopted in the 1840s was harmful to Britain’s imperial progress. On the other side, the Liberal party, though suspicious of democracy, presented itself under William Gladstone, Liberal prime minister on four occasions, as a scourge of privilege. That was the central reason why it was so strong for free trade, a commitment that endured as the party evolved in Edwardian times into the founder of the modern welfare state.⁵ The broad mass of the Liberal party’s MPs and of those who voted for it were, if they considered it at all, supportive of empire, of its extension when necessary and of closer links with the growing white empire, though without any violation of the free trade creed. Although largely favourable to the civilising mission, the party was much more inclined than the Conservatives to try to promote reforms in the dependent parts of the empire that would give its native populations a greater share in government and administration: hence Gladstone’s and Ripon’s failed attempt to give Indians a bigger role in the Indian judiciary in the 1870s and the pre-war Asquith administration’s more successful policy of a generation later, that gave the educated Indian middle class greater influence on provincial government.

Not surprisingly, most of the serious critics of imperial policy and ideology were to be found in the Liberal party’s ranks. Those critics can be divided roughly into two main groups. The first were the small group of radical critics like Hobson. They complained that the rising cost of maintaining an ever-expanding empire was draining Britain of its wealth and diverting its energies from the domestic arena where, it was claimed, Britain’s future would be decided. But they also believed that empire was corrosive of British moral character.⁶ The second were those best described as ‘Liberal Imperialists’. They were enthusiasts for empire and many of them, apart from a much stronger commitment to free trade, were indistinguishable from the Conservatives. Nonetheless, some prominent Liberal Imperialists questioned official policy and ideology sharply, or discussed it in ways that illustrated the difficulties and the dilemmas of orthodoxy. Politicians such as Lord Rosebery, Sir Charles Dilke and Herbert Samuel fall into that category: Joseph Chamberlain, despite achieving cabinet status in Gladstone’s government in 1880–5 and his history as a radical in search of land reform, is more difficult to place. He parted from the main body of the Liberal movement in 1886 by objecting to Irish Home Rule and helping to form the Liberal Unionist breakaway group that opposed it. But Chamberlain’s commitment to imperialism thereafter was so strong that he joined the Conservative cabinet in 1895 and led the campaign against the Afrikaners that ended in the South African war of 1899–1902. That, together with his growing protectionist sympathies, make it difficult to call him a Liberal Imperialist by the late 1890s. Rosebery, and Dilke who had flirted with republicanism and was close to Chamberlain in his youth, stayed faithful to the free trade faith, as did Samuel who, like Dilke, was on the social reforming side of the Edwardian party.⁷

The book also investigates the influence of the character discourse on the imperial thinking of a number of academics and other intellectual supporters of empire, including J. A. Froude, the historian, whose approach was influenced by Carlyle and Ruskin, and whose allegiance was to the Conservative party.⁸ Most of them, however, were adherents of the Liberal or the Liberal Unionist party, such as the historian J. R. Seeley; Meredith Townsend, a prominent journalist and editor who had experience in India; and C. H. Pearson, historian and politician, whose Australian career gave him a unique perspective on the future of empire.⁹ All could be described as Liberal Imperialists, and are discussed here because they questioned the optimistic views of those whom Seeley described as the ‘bombastic’ school.

Despite much political support, the imperial officer class, from Viceroys and provincial governors right down to the district officers, were often deeply distrustful of party politics. They had to contend with the small but vociferous group of radical Liberals who, like Hobson, were bitterly opposed to every attempt to expand or consolidate the empire and constantly criticised British policy in the dependent portions of the empire such as India. Much more worrying for them was what they saw as the industrial middle class’s obsession with amassing wealth and its abiding cosmopolitanism which had a big impact within the Liberal party and which, imperialists believed, blinded the former to the dangers inherent in a world of rampant nationalism and imperialism. This enduring cosmopolitanism, of which free trade was the most notable emblem, reflected the fact that Britain, from the eighteenth century onward, had developed as a global rather than merely an imperial economic power. The strongest supporters of empire were also deeply concerned about working class attitudes to empire as that class was enfranchised by the 1867 and 1884 Reform Acts, and democracy began to emerge. Imperialists had no doubt that the broad mass of voters could be roused to imperial fervour in moments of high tension such as the South African War of 1899–1902: but they felt that the latter were normally too concerned with domestic issues to understand the need for a large and steady commitment to imperial preservation and expansion. In the eyes of the great pro-consular figures, for example, democratic politics were odious because they reflected a general complacency and ignorance about the empire...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Character, Ethics and Economics
• Title
• Copright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Character, Virtue and British Imperialism
• 2 Justifying Empire: An Overview
• 3 Boundless spaces: Character, ‘Greater Britain’ and ‘Anglo-Saxondom’
• 4 Cromer, Character and Imperialism: The British Financial Administration of Egypt, 1878–1908
• 5 The Civilising Mission in India and Africa
• 6 Civilising India and Africa: The Doubters, 1860–1914
• 7 The civilising Mission as the End of Empire? C. H. Pearson and his Critics
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index