The British Empire as a World Power

Ten Studies

Edward Ingram

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780714651514
• eBook ISBN: 9781135277697
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

These ten studies analyse the steps of the formation dance the British danced in the Middle Eastern international system from the late 18th Century to the outbreak of the Cold War.

Part I
Shifting Sands

Suddenly the past seems to me as unreliable as the future.

Frances Brooklyn, Perfect Happiness, Ch. 5

I
The Wonderland of the Political Scientist

POLITICAL scientists who do not read history have to go into business as water diviners or, like economists, as prophets who wait patiently for the future to prove them wrong. The past in which political scientists who do read history claim to test their ideas is, however, often unrecognizable to historians. It resembles Alice's Wonderland, in which the more one thinks one recognizes, the bigger are the surprises in store. And the past serves a different purpose for each discipline. Whereas the past shows the political scientist standing in the present the way to a future already planned, the historian standing in the past is content to look around him and is supposed not to know ahead of time what may turn up next.

False Distinctions

Three distinctions political scientists often draw between their discipline and history are false. The first distinction is between the political scientists interest in generally applicable propositions and the historian's interest in particular instances. Rarely do historians who write about politics and international relations deal with particular instances (and they are forbidden by E. H. Carr to touch the unique):¹ even micro-historians claim to see the entire world in their grains of sand. Historians, who read lives to learn about times and are less interested in decision-makers than in their decisions, undertake to represent classes or categories of things. They are naturally unwilling to leave the formulation of general principles entirely to others. Second, the distinction between the political scientist's theory-based analysis and the historian's evidence-based description is false. The historian's description is a form of analysis (it explains); likewise, narrative (which has nothing to do with chronology) is applied theory, an analytical test of a proposition: each presupposes the other and, without the other, neither can be carried out. Third, the distinction between the political scientist's parsimony and the historian's complexity is false: it disappears on close reading. The political scientist's maximizing leverage is equivalent to the historian's proposition that accounts for most of the evidence.

True Distinctions

Six other distinctions, however, are true and must be acknowledged by political scientists and historians when reading one another's work: approach, perspective, evidence, time, stance and subject.

Approach

Political scientists are distinguished from historians by how they approach their subject: they do not mean the same thing when they talk of international relations. Political and diplomatic historians often look at the political systems that political scientists study, especially the international system, the way they look at individual lives: as vehicles or signifiers, opportunities to explain something else. Diplomatic history is as much a technique of enquiry as the study of past international relations. The foreign policy of the East India Company's government in India at the turn of the eighteenth century, for example, is best treated either as a form of rhetoric or as an expression of cultural values. The events that took place at Hyderabad and Poona bear no relation to the reports of them at Calcutta or Bombay, which reveal more about what the British thought went on in Imperial Rome than what was going on in post-Mogul India.²

Perspective

Political scientists are also distinguishable from historians by their perspective on the past. Firmly rooted in their contemporary world and hoping, by looking about them, to foretell the future, political scientists are interested in the past only as it affects the present. The past interests historians for itself. Before they can go forwards, historians must first leap backwards into another country where everything is done differently The task they set themselves is impossible of fulfilment, of course: they will not succeed in making a landing, because they cannot turn themselves into someone else at will, however hard they try. Political scientists make a mistake, therefore, in trying to turn historians into idealists.³ Most historians, unhappy to grope about in a fog, try to explain what did happen, as well as what their subjects thought was happening. Their work implies – and demands – a theory taken with them in their baggage.

The difference in perspective between historians and political scientists leads to a different test for significance. For political scientists, what matters is not what mattered at the time but what contributes to what will matter later on. George Modelski's long-cycle theory, for example, postulates a late twentieth-century phenomenon – the fully developed world leader embodied in the United States – and looks to the past to trace its growth from an embryo in sixteenth-century Portugal.⁴ As a result, the fourth of five stages of the leader's growth from embryo to maturity occurs in a nineteenth-century Britain unknown to historians. It wins and loses wars at unexpected times and, as Paul W. Schroeder often complains, is both too powerful and too weak at the wrong moments.⁵ Long-cycle theory requires Britain to be a sea power whose wealth derives from overseas trade, when it was a land power whose wealth derived from investment, and requires empire-building to go hand in hand with decline (that celebrated fictitious challenge from imperial Germany), when it went hand in hand with rise more than 100 years before. The symmetry of the cycles on which the theory depends determines the test for significance of the evidence. The pattern is drawn before the inquiry begins. Although it will be coloured in attractively, its shape will not change.

Evidence

One can differentiate political scientists from historians most clearly, therefore, by the manner in which they present their evidence: the particular for each bears a different relationship to the general. For the historian, the example presented is claimed to be representative. Not good enough, comments the political scientist, who asks for many examples, preferably in a cluster although a sequence may be allowed. For the political scientist, a theory is often redefined to remove perceived blemishes, then proved using case studies: for examples, see Stephen M. Walt on the relationship between revolution and war, Jack Snyder on imperial overstretch, and James L. Richardson on the stages of crisis.⁶ Historians read the theory with interest and find it useful, although it often seems closed and self-referential: an alternative to the evidence rather than a way of making more of it or creating new varieties. They are puzzled, however, by the gap between the rigour of the theory and the paucity of the examples. Why these cases? And why no explanation for leaving out dozens of others? The answer is obvious. The cases are not repeatable experiments designed to test a theory: they are illustrations of a proposition taken to be sound. The cases claim to be representative – something historians understand, even if they deny the particular claim.

The historian's single example may be more representative than the political scientist's cluster. It is researched more deeply and comprehensively and set in a broader context. It implies a theory and tries to advance its development, perhaps by refinement, perhaps by revisionism; it continues a discussion instead of claiming to be a proof. Nor are historians persuaded that a cluster of lightly researched, detached – at best semi-detached – cases, often written up by different scholars, is likely to advance the argument any better.

Historians do not understand why political scientists expect to be able to make so many bricks with so little straw and, when they try, to persuade anybody that their buildings are sound. Postmodernists understand: no world is outside their window waiting patiently to be measured; it waits only in the eye – or in the text – of the beholder. But if political scientists are scientists, should historians allow them to rely on theory as a substitute for experiment? Take, for example, the so-called 'democratic peace': the proposition that democratic states do not fight one another. How, historians ask, are we to know whether the proposition is true, when no powerful democratic states existed before the First World War, and the only ones in existence for the first 30 years after the Second World War were US clients, too weak to turn against their patron, who would not allow them to turn against one another? Between 1916 and 1945, however, the two most powerful so-called 'democratic' states, the United States and Britain, had gone to war with one another, to fight until one of them was destroyed.

The proposition that democratic states do not fight one another has yet to overcome the history of the Anglo-American 'special relationship'. States look for their enemies among their friends, and the closer the friendship, the greater the peril. Although the United States did not formally declare war against Britain during the Second World War, it did destroy Britain and may have done so deliberately:⁷ the intention matters less to diplomatic historians than the outcome. Nor need one revise the proposition to exchange willingness to fight for willingness to injure or destroy. The United States used good old-fashioned force against Britain: formulating a grand strategy in Europe that was bound to destroy Britain's army and bankrupt its economy, and a parallel strategy for Asia that destabilized the Indian Empire by appeasing Chiang Kai-shek.⁸ 'Competitive cooperation'⁹ is David Reynolds's euphemism for a relationship between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt that, in fact, became an extreme version of an alliance of restraint in which the weaker partner commits suicide by inviting its stronger partner to strangle it. In Britain's case, the United States was all too willing to oblige.

Time

Political scientists and historians live by different ideas about time. In a timeless world, political scientists emulate postmodernist literary theorists, detaching cases from their temporal moorings and treating them as similar or identical to the degree that they contain similar or identical components. Historians live by an idiosyncratic version of clock time in which the clock may travel in both directions, but travels backwards more often than forwards. The First World War does cause the Crimean War, for historians if not for Napoleon III and Viscount Palmerston. Any new strain of international tension in the early twentieth century travels quickly backwards through the Bismarckian system towards the Concert of Europe. Similarly, the end of the Cold War changes the goals of Soviet foreign policy in the 1920s and disguises Joseph Stalin as Adolf Hitler in the eyes of Harry Truman and Clement Attlee at Potsdam.¹⁰ Margaret Hilda Thatcher's assault on British industry waved away the Industrial Revolution and changed late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Britons from E. P. Thompson's robust self-made working class, teetering on the verge of revolution, into Ian Christie's and Linda Colley's obsequious patriots deferring to land, Church and City of London.¹¹

Stance

Whereas political scientists (standing aloof from the material they propose to organize) theorize first and then illustrate the theory, historians usually plunge in, then try to decide where they are, what is going on, and how they might explain what they have seen. Sometimes they turn to the political scientist for help, but whenever they do they place themselves at risk of catching the disease of backward projection. In a recent discussion of US grand strategy during the Eisenhower administration, for example, Robert J. McMahon criticizes its unnecessary alarmism in the face of an imaginary Soviet challenge in the Third World. 'Never before in history had an economically weak state forged an empire by buying influence against the opposition of a far richer opponent.'¹² The works cited in support of this proposition were written by political scientists who are, as usual, relying on cases to illustrate the proposition rather than to test it.¹³ What sounds like good theoretical sense when looking at the world from the rich and powerful late-twentieth-century United States happens, however, not to be true. Poor Russia forged an Asian empire during the nineteenth century despite the opposition of rich Britain, by acting most aggressively in regions in which it possessed greater geopolitical leverage and its rival could respond least effectively.

Sometimes, no help from political science is on offer. As the world theorized becomes unrecognizable, historians cannot find it. American political scientists often turn to the British Empire, for example (and I use the present tense advisedly), as a source of parables designed to point up the likely future of the United States; it provides a second experiment with which to test a theory – save that the enquiry completes a circle. American pessimists who ask whether the United States will suffer the same decline in wealth and power as late-nineteenth-century Britain (which did not then decline, as it happens, but error is not the criticism here) see nineteenth-century Britain wearing twentieth-century American clothes: they do not see the United States wearing borrowed British clothes. Although Europe's past may resemble the United States' future, nobody may say that this future shall resemble Europe's past. American political scientists sometimes have difficulty looking inwards from outside as well as forwards into the future from the past.

Subject

For the political scientist, both the United States and Great Britain operate in an international system that does not, and never did, exist for the historian. The principal characteristics of their two systems do not match. Until the transformation of a multipolar system into a (supposedly) bipolar system at the end of the Second World War, the political scientist's international system supposedly was composed – to try to make the proposition parsimonious enough – of a group of autonomous, sovereign, easily identifiable nation-states, as if everybody knows what they were, where they were and when they existed. Ignoring for the moment the important qualification that all the states in question were not nation-states but empires – in which sovereignty is divisible and one cannot always be sure when one has crossed the frontier¹⁴ – let us allow them to be separate, if not national. To borrow Aristide R. Zolberg's words when criticizing the proposition, for political scientists these states 'may be considered as solid bodies whose behaviour can be accounted for by an analysis of how they interact with one another qua solids'.¹⁵ Historians, however, see states as both porous and fluid, with the tiresome habit of moving around or mixing themselves up. The characteristic sufficient (probably, and certainly necessary) to explain the system's operation is not sovereign autonomy but overlap, in time, in space and in ranking.

All three types of overlap affected the operation of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century international system. An argument about time – that is whether the future of the Ottoman Empire had arrived – caused the misunderstandings between Russia and Austria, and Russia and Britain that led to the Crimean War. The three states agreed that the future of the Ottoman Empire meant partition. They disagreed about the speed at which the future would arrive; how one could tell whether it had; whether anything should be done to prevent it; and which of them was entitled to claim the lead in managing the outcome. Time overlapped with rank when Russia claimed that France, and Britain and Austria claimed that Russia, was trying to turn an intermediary in which all of them had established territorial rights into a protectorate.

If overlap in time and rank caused the Crimean War, overlap in space caused the First World War. For the 30 years between the Congress...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• PART I: SHIFTING SANDS
• PART II LONG-TERM COMMITMENTS
• Index