Pax Britannica?

British Foreign Policy 1789-1914

Muriel E. Chamberlain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317870616
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Pax Britannica? is a study of Britain's international role and foreign policy during the century of her imperial greatness. The study shows how her foreign policy was affected, and to some extent, dictated by her domestic political issues. In her stimulating and readable study, Dr Chamberlain explains the how the whole nature of foreign-policy making changed in the nineteenth century. Once the preserve of a small handful of monarchs and professional diplomats, it was transformed by the expansion of the fanchise, the influence of the press and the mobilisation of public opinion by men such as Disraeli and Palmerston.

I. THE STAGE IS SET: THE AGE OF PITT

Chapter 1

THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE AMERICAN WAR, 1783–1792

The eighteenth century was an age of contrasts. On the one hand it was a time of rationality and noble aspirations. Men believed that, by the exercise of reason, they could discover the laws which should govern human society, just as they were discovering the laws which governed the natural universe. On the other hand, it was an age of violence in both national and international affairs. Crimes were savagely punished because governments felt that the skin of civilisation was thin and demonic forces could easily break through. In international affairs the eighteenth century – much more than the post-Bismarckian era – was the age of realpolitik, when national or dynastic interests were everything and no sovereign state recognised any authority superior to itself. As A. J. P. Taylor puts it, nations ran up and down the scale ‘with dizzy rapidity’ (Taylor 1954: xxii). Poland and Spain, which would have been accounted Great Powers at the beginning of the century, were both the prey of ambitious neighbours by the end. Russia, and more doubtfully, Prussia, were coming to be recognised as the Great Powers of the future. In such a world it was even more true than when Palmerston said it in the following century, that Britain had no eternal allies, only eternal interests (3 Hansard xcvii 122; 1 March 1848). But, if Britain appeared to have a constant enemy, it was France.

Britain and France fought each other four times in the eighteenth century. During the war of the Spanish Succession at the beginning of the century, Britain joined with Austria, Prussia, Holland, Denmark and Portugal to curb the power of Louis XIV, and the Treaty of Utrecht at the end of the war was one of the key treaties of European history, still appealed to even after the Vienna Settlement at the end of the Napoleonic wars. The War of the Austrian Succession some thirty years later confirmed Britain as a permanent part of the balance of power in Europe. The Seven Years War (1756–63) brought Britain glory, previously undreamed of, even though the final stages of the war were marked by serious strains with her principal continental ally, Prussia, which may in the long run have weakened Britain’s position in Europe (Horn 1967: 162).

But, in 1763, the British public were much more impressed by their almost unqualified success overseas. The French had surrendered Quebec to Britain and the long-standing threat to Britain’s thirteen colonies on the eastern seaboard of North America seemed to be over. The French had also, for all practical purposes, given up their claims in India and the English East India Company was left unchallenged as the most important European influence in the sub-continent. In an age dominated by mercantilist theories of economic rivalry and the desirability of economic self-sufficiency, colonies were the objects of fierce competition among the European powers. Britain could now claim to be recognised, not only as a first-class European power, but also as a world power.

Within twenty years the dream crashed in ruins. In 1776 the Thirteen Colonies rebelled and France, Spain and even Holland came to their aid. Irritated by Britain’s interpretation of her ‘maritime rights’, in particular her right to seize enemy goods on neutral ships, Prussia, Russia, Austria, Sweden, Denmark and Portugal all joined in the ‘Armed Neutrality’ of 1780 to resist the British claims. (For a clear exposition of the different points of view see Semmel 1986: 13–18.) Some belated naval successes saved Britain from the worst consequences of this almost total isolation, but America was a lost cause. In September 1783, by the Treaty of Versailles, Britain had to recognise the independence of the United States.

Britain’s humiliation appeared complete. Lord Shelburne, who as First Lord of the Treasury from July 1782 to April 1783 played an important role in the final settlement, had believed only a little earlier that, if American independence were granted, ‘the sun of Great Britain is set, and we shall no longer be a powerful or respectable people’. The novelist Horace Walpole wrote to the childless Lord Stafford, ‘You must be happy now not to have a son, who would live to grovel in the dregs of England’, and prophesied that England would become virtually a province of France (quoted Coupland 1930: 12–14). Europeans agreed. Joseph II of Austria thought that England had descended for ever to ‘the rank of a second rate power like Sweden and Denmark’ (quoted Ehrman 1969: 476). On good mercantilist principles sober-minded Englishmen feared not only disgrace and loss of international prestige, but also trade depression and national bankruptcy.

None of this came to pass. It was left to a later generation to analyse why not. Professor Vincent Harlow argued convincingly in the 1950s (Harlow 1952; but see also Marshall 1964, Hyam 1967 and Mackesy 1984: 11) that the loss of the American colonies only confirmed and accelerated changes in British development which were already under way. Colonies of settlement in the west were becoming less important than trading opportunities in the east. India and Asia now mattered more to the British economy than North America. The agricultural and industrial revolutions were fundamentally altering Britain’s relations with the rest of the world. Mercantilist theories of controlled and restricted trade were on their way out. Free trade theories were on their way in. One early sign of this was the steady increase in trade between Britain and South America, where she had no political control.

At home Britain settled down to a decade of practical administrative reforms during the ‘peace ministry’ of the youthful William Pitt. More far-reaching reforms, even parliamentary reforms, were discussed. Humanitarian ideas which swept through the whole of western Europe (Cobban 1960), not just Britain, led to the questioning of evils like the Atlantic slave trade. In general the 1780s were a decade of hope, rather than despair.

The government soon roused itself to defend Britain’s remaining world-wide interests. In 1784 Pitt’s India Act established the dual system of crown and company government, by which the British Crown and the East India Company were to co-operate to govern large tracts of the Indian sub-continent until after the Mutiny in 1857. In 1791 Pitt’s Canada Act regulated the government of the former French Canada which, surprisingly, had not taken advantage of the events of 1776–83 to throw off British rule.

The British were ready to reassert themselves in both North America and the Pacific. They manoeuvred to try to retain control of the lucrative fur trade in the interior of North America. The distant prize was trade with China. Captain James Cook’s three great exploratory voyages, carried out between 1768 and 1781, suggested glittering possibilities to his fellow countrymen. One of the problems was that there were few western goods that the Chinese wanted in return for the tea, silks and porcelain which the West desired from them. Furs were one of the few exceptions.

In 1778 Cook identified a site, Nootka Sound on what became Vancouver Island, which seemed to have excellent potential as a station from which furs could be shipped to China. Ten years later a group of Britons established themselves there with the blessings of their government. A triangular trade was envisaged, which would also have drawn in the Pacific whalers and seal-trappers.

The objections came, not from the Americans, but from the Spanish. Although Spain was already a declining power in Europe, she clung fiercely to her claims to trading monopolies in both the Pacific and the South Atlantic. In 1770 Spain had expelled a number of Britons from the Falkland Islands. A European war nearly ensued but a compromise was reached by which the Britons were sent back, although apparently with a promise, fulfilled in 1774, that they would leave voluntarily. (Palmerston subsequently denied that there had ever been such a deal, BFSP 1833–34: 1386, 1393–4; but Harlow accepts it as probable, 1952: 22–32.)

In April 1789 the Spaniards similarly expelled a group of British whalers from Patagonia. They resented, but could not prevent, the new British settlement at Botany Bay on the eastern coast of Australia, which they saw as a threat to their principal Pacific base in the Philippines.

Spain still claimed the whole west coast of America up to the boundary of what is now Alaska, which had been in Russian hands since the 1740s. The British, on the other hand, had never accepted the validity of Spanish claims north of the modern American state of California, then part of the Spanish province of Mexico.

In May 1789 two Spanish warships sailed into Nootka Sound, hauled down the British flag, and later arrested the British traders and seized their ships. News of this confrontation did not reach London until the following January. Public opinion would not have allowed Pitt to back down even if he had been disposed to do so; as a contemporary said, ‘The din of war ran through the country like wild-fire.’ (Quoted Ehrman 1969: 558.) But in fact Pitt saw the opportunity for a comprehensive settlement by which the Spaniards would be compelled to withdraw their far-reaching claims over unoccupied American territory. In May 1789 Britain began to equip a naval squadron and Parliament voted over £1 million credit.

Both sides looked for allies. Spain found both France and the United States unresponsive but Britain succeeded in engaging the support of Prussia and Holland, who also disliked the Spanish claims to monopoly. In October Pitt presented an ultimatum to the Spaniards who had no alternative but to accept it. The British ships were released and compensation agreed. The Spaniards withdrew their claims to the coast north of California and recognised British trading and fishing rights in the Pacific as long as they did not encroach upon established Spanish territories.

It seemed a fairly comprehensive victory. It opened the way for the establishment of British Columbia and the creation of a British North America which stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific and became the modern state of Canada. But what was mainly at issue in the 1790s was the Pacific trade. Within less than a decade of the apparently disastrous Treaty of Versailles, Britain had re-asserted herself as a maritime power and as a world trading power.

Her interventions in European politics, where decisions of crucial importance for the future were also being made, were less successful. In Eastern Europe both Poland and Turkey, important components in the eighteenth-century balance, were beginning to crumble. Their weakness presented a continual temptation to their neighbours, particularly Russia. British interests in Poland arose mainly from the fact that it represented an alternative source of timber and other naval stores after the loss of the American colonies (Anderson 1966: 18). The question of what would replace the Turkish (Ottoman) empire, if it collapsed altogether, was one of the most disturbing problems of nineteenth-century diplomacy.

In 1774 Catherine the Great compelled the Turks to sign the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji, which gave Russia a firm footing on the Black Sea, the right to pass through the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles into the Mediterranean and an ill-defined right to ‘protect’ the Christian subjects of the Sultan. In 1783 the Russians annexed the Crimea and began the construction of the great naval base of Sebastopol.

A new war four years later alarmed Europe but this time Russia was less successful and, by 1791, Catherine was willing to sign a compromise peace but she was anxious to retain the fortress of Ochakov on the Black Sea. The Ochakov incident, as it became known, marked Britain’s first active participation in the Eastern Question. The defence of India, which was such an important motive for British involvement later, was not in the forefront of the government’s mind in 1791. They felt some concern for eastern European trade routes – Ochakov was supposed to command the mouths of the rivers Bug and Dniester and so important routes into the Black Sea. But Pitt seems to have been persuaded to act by the young British envoy in Berlin, Joseph Ewart, who argued the need to give Prussia a quid pro quo for her support over Nootka Sound (Ehrman 1983: 8–12, 15–16, 29).

Pitt took unusually precipitate action. In March 1791 he sent an ultimatum to St Petersburg and asked the House of Commons for an increase in the fleet with a view to possible action against Russia. For once he had badly miscalculated. His cabinet was divided and both Parliament and the public hostile. They were unconvinced as to the value of Ochakov and there was a powerful lobby, which objected to the disruption of Britain’s considerable trade with Russia. A special envoy, William Fawkener, was sent to St Petersburg for talks and, in the end, Britain acquiesced in the Treaty of Jassy of 1792, which made the Dniester the frontier between Russia and the Ottoman empire and so ceded Ochakov to Russia, although minor commercial safeguards were written into the treaty.

Britain’s lack of success over Ochakov may have persuaded the British government that there was little they could do in the Polish question, which was to have such a destabilising effect on eastern Europe in the eighteenth century and to prepare the way for the perpetual conflicts of the nineteenth. By the First Partition in 1772 Russia, Prussia and Austria deprived Poland of half her population and a third of her territory. They were hungry for more. In particular, Prussia wanted the Vistula port of Thorn (Torun) and the great Baltic port of Danzig (Gdansk). Events in France and the distraction they provided enabled Russia and Prussia to carry out a further partition in 1793 and all three Eastern powers joined in the final partition in 1795.

In such a world of realpolitik it was inevitable that the outbreak of serious political troubles in France in 1789 should at first have been assessed by diplomats and politicians mainly in terms of its likely effect on the international equilibrium. Charles James Fox might write to a friend of the fall of the Bastille on 14 July, ‘How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world! and how much the best!’ (Russell 1863 : vol. 2, 361) but he was untypical. On the other side of the question, Edmund Burke was almost alone in warning his countrymen that 1789 was not in the least like their own revered revolution of 1688, which had been concerned to preserve the constitution. This revolution would unleash forces which the French would not be able to control and its most probable outcome would be a military dictatorship.

Chapter 2

THE FRENCH WARS, 1792–1812

The British, on the whole, eyed the early stages of the French revolution benevolently enough. Anything which distracted and embarrassed the French king was likely to be to their advantage. The British Foreign Secretary, the Duke of Leeds, even wrote to the British ambassador in Paris, a fortnight after the fall of the Bastille, ‘I defy the ablest Heads in England to have planned, or its whole Wealth to have purchased, a Situation so fatal to its Rival, as that to which France is now reduced by her own Intestine Commotions.’ (quoted Ehrman 1983: 4) The fact that involvement in the American War of Independence had helped to administer the coup de grâce to the over-strained French finances could not but add relish to their satisfaction. Most English observers expected some form of limited monarchy to emerge from the troubles in France, undoing the absolutist work of Louis XIV. That too would be a gain. Absolutist monarchies were believed to be more aggressive and ambitious than constitutional ones. On 17 February 1792, Pitt made his famous prophecy that he expected fifteen years of peace in Europe.

Pitt was devastatingly wrong but his speech illustrates his pragmatic approach to events in France. Holland Rose’s verdict on Pitt’s attitude to the Revolution still stands; ‘It was not that of a doctrinaire but of a practical statesman’, which ‘changed with changing events’ (Holland Rose 1911: vol. 1, 537; cf. Ehrman 1983: 47–9, 79–81). Unless and until British interests were directly threatened, there was no need for British intervention. Such a threat could only come from a challenge to British obligations in Europe or an open appeal to sedition beyond the borders of France. Neither seemed likely in the early years of the revolution. But both came in 1792.

The direct threat to British interests came in the Low Countries, in the Austrian Netherlands (modern Belgium), which Austria had acquired from Spain in 1714. In November 1792 the French revolutionary armies drove the Austrians out of Belgium and, on the 16th of that month, the new French National Convention issued a proclamation promising that the River Scheldt would be open to navigation.

The fate of the Low Countries had always been regarded as a vital British strategic interest, but Britain’s attitude to the Scheldt question had not always been consistent. By the Treaty of Münster of 1648, at the end of the Thirty Years War, the Dutch had secured the sole right of navigation of the Scheldt estuary, thus effectually stifling the trade of the great Belgian port of Antwerp, which lay further up river. As recently as 1780, when she was at war with Holland during the American War of Independence, Britain had used the threat of opening up the Scheldt against the Dutch. But the circumstances of 1792 were very different. Now France was in control of Belgium and looked likely to invade Holland. No rival Great Power, and certainly not France, must control the Low Countries. Pitt’s government took their stand on the sanctity of treaties, in this case the Treaty of Münster.

Two months earlier, in September 1792, the French king, Louis XVI, had been deposed and on 19 November the National Convention issued another proclamation offering to help all people who were struggling to free themselves from their kings. This was to throw down the gauntlet with a vengeance and the British government could not but take it seriously.

The forces of ‘law and order’ were very thin in an age when there was no regular police force but only the Commission of the Peace, the magistrates, with powers to enrol special constables and, if the worst came to the worst, to call out the troops. Riots were endemic, often occasioned by ‘shortages’ and the resulting high prices for food. But food riots, serious though they could be, were not a deliberate challenge to the political system. When a more overtly political element crept in, as in the very dangerous Gordon riots of 1780, when London was out of official control for three days, the movement was often, in a perverse way, conservative. The Gordon rioters regarded themselves as defending the Protestant constitution against concessions to the Catholics. (See the very good discussion in Ehrman 1983: Chs IV and V.)

The 1790s saw the emergence of a quite different danger. The challenge was no longer contained within the constitution but was an actual challenge to it, basing itself upon new and different principles. In February 1792 the second part of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man was published. It was produced very cheaply and immediately had an enormous sale. Drawing upon both the American and the French revolutions, it was rightly seen as a call ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Maps
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Myths of British Foreign Policy
• Part I. The Stage is Set: The Age of Pitt
• Part II. The Classical Period of Nineteenth-Century Diplomacy
• Part III. A New and More Dangerous World
• Conclusion
• Appendix A: British Prime Ministers, 1789–1914
• Appendix B: British Foreign Secretaries, 1789–1914
• Bibliography
• Maps
• Index