Britannia Overruled

British Policy and World Power in the Twentieth Century

David Reynolds

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317877363
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book brings together the often separated histories of diplomacy, defence, economics and empire in a provocative reinterpretation of British 'decline'. It also offers a broader reflection on the nature of international power and the mechanisms of policymaking. For this Second Edition, David Reynolds has added a new chapters and extends his lively and incisive analysis to the beginning of the new millennium.

CHAPTER ONE

Power

The relativities of power

For the student of international relations few concepts are more important than that of ‘power’. Yet its meaning is difficult to pin down. In common parlance we tend to judge a country’s power by the size of its armed forces or the number of missiles it possesses. We also rank countries as greater or lesser powers. Yet scholars agree that we would be wiser to think of power not as a possession but as a relationship¹ – one in which A gets B to do something that B would not otherwise do. This can be effected in various ways. Outright war is obviously the most extreme form, but other modes of power include coercion, manipulation, inducements and influence, as we move toward the opposite end of the spectrum. The sources of a country’s power are also diverse. It is customary to focus on those that translate easily into military might, particularly population, natural resources and, in the industrial age, economic strength. Aside from such ‘tangible’ elements, however, scholars also note the importance of ‘intangibles’ such as national unity and morale, the coherence of the governmental system, the quality of leadership or diplomatic skill.²

All these elements come into play in a particular power relationship between two states. A strong economy may not be decisive if the country’s armed forces are ill-prepared for war. A large army may be irrelevant if the country has no will to fight, or if its leaders are distracted by other concerns at home or abroad. A state with limited economic resources may be able to secure unexpected advantage by diplomatic dexterity. And the reputation for being powerful may ensure influence long after economic and military strength has waned, particularly if war can be avoided.

There is a danger, therefore, in categorising countries as ‘minor’ or ‘great’ powers, as ‘world powers’, ‘superpowers’, and the like. Although useful shorthands, such language can lure us into a static understanding of power as a permanent possession. Conceiving, instead, of power in relative terms means recognising that it may vary from situation to situation: the United States played a decisive role in defeating advanced industrial nations like Germany and Japan in 1945, yet it could not overcome the third-world peasant state of North Vietnam. Likewise, the Soviet Union was able to coerce Eastern European satellites such as Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968 but it could not defeat the Afghanistan guerrillas in the 1980s. Power is also relative across time: countries rise and fall in effective power, for reasons that are usually connected with the state of their economies and armed forces but which are by no means simply reducible to those factors. Often the perception of a country’s power, at home and abroad, is as important as its actual capabilities³ – as the Americans discovered in the 1970s after Vietnam.

Power, then, is relative not absolute; its sources are intangible as well as tangible. What matters is not abstract rankings of great powers but the complex balance of forces in each particular power relationship. These complexities of power must be kept in mind when examining the British case. But there is another important relativity. What happened to Britain was paralleled by the story of several other Western European states in the twentieth century, notably France, but also Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands. The fate of the so-called ‘Pax Britannica’ cannot be understood through purely British-centred explanations, for it is tied up with the rise and fall of a ‘Eurocentric’ world.

For a millennium after the fall of Rome, Europe was on the periphery of ‘civilisation’. The world’s centre of gravity lay in the Near East, India, and China – technological pioneer of gunpowder, canals and the mechanical clock. The world’s most dynamic ideological force in this millennium was not Christianity but Islam, whose expansion reached its apogee in the great early-modem empires of the Mughals in India, the Safavids in Persia and the Ottomans in the Near East. For centuries the Islamic tide lapped around the Mediterranean, leaving an indelible mark on the Balkans and southern Spain. As late as 1683 Ottoman armies were at the gates of Vienna.

But by this time the Europeans were reaching out around the globe, using the sailing ship which they had developed to a state of unequalled sophistication. As traders and as settlers they expanded into Asia and the Americas, with the countries of Northwest Europe, strategically located on the Atlantic seaboard, taking the lead. Although conventionally dated from around 1500, this was a slow process: in 1700 much of the world’s production and trade remained concentrated in Asia and the crisis of the three great Islamic empires came only in the eighteenth century.⁴ The process of European expansion was accelerated by five great bouts of European war in the period 1689–1815, during which French hegemony was destroyed as part of a world-wide struggle for trade and colonies. Although by the end of these wars most of the Americas – North and South – had thrown off colonial rule, European outreach intensified throughout the world in the nineteenth century with the spread of industrialisation. European manufactures and non-European primary products became part of a global trading system, and a new struggle for colonies broke out in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, centred now on Africa.

By 1900 the Europeans seemed supreme. They occupied one-third of the earth’s land surface in 1800, two-thirds by 1878 and 84 per cent in 1914.⁵ Yet within fifty years the tide of history had ebbed dramatically. In the eighteenth century the wars over French hegemony had helped spread European influence around the globe. In the first half of the twentieth century two great German bids for domination sapped Europe’s wealth and brought the Continent under the influence of two new ‘superpowers’, America and Russia. The first of these was a veritable economic giant in 1945, producing half the world’s manufactured goods. At the same time the process of decolonisation accelerated dramatically and by the late 1960s most of the European empires had disappeared. In their wake all the European powers faced a painful process of re-definition, which increasingly focused on the development of the European Community. By the 1990s the economic centre of the world was again shifting away from Europe, this time to the Pacific basin, which accounted for two-thirds of the world’s population and generated half of its total gross domestic product by the year 2000.⁶ And Islam was once more a world force, both in population and ideological vigour. The collapse of the ‘iron curtain’ in 1989 gave Europe the prospect of a new unity and its Western part remains a significant force in international affairs, but its three centuries of world dominance are over – at least for the foreseeable future.

Any account of Britain’s changing place in the world over the last century must therefore recognise that it is part of this larger metamorphosis of European power. Purely British-centred explanations are inadequate. Yet in the nineteenth century Britain did achieve a remarkable international position and, in order to understand how and why it was lost, we must begin by identifying what this was.

Britannia rules

Britain stood in the vanguard of the great movements of European expansion – commerce and conquest in the eighteenth century, industry and empire in the nineteenth. Its principal advantage was probably an island position. Unlike rivals such as France or Prussia, sharing land borders with often hostile powers, Britain could shelter behind what Shakespeare called its ‘moat defensive’, the English Channel. This did not guarantee immunity – in the 1690s and again in 1804–5 the threat of invasion seemed acute – but it did mean that normally the British did not need the sort of large standing army that became familiar on the Continent. The Royal Navy, however, was both popular and necessary – a trend also encouraged during the Civil War years when the service was placed on a properly-funded footing. The navy was Britain’s main barrier against hostile forces crossing the Channel. It was also important because, as an island, increasingly dependent on the import of food and key raw materials such as cotton, Britain needed to protect its seaborne commerce from privateering and wartime enemies.

Britain’s insular position left it well-placed to capitalise on the five great rounds of warfare against France. While French leaders from Louis XIV to Napoleon had to fight their primary battles on land against continental foes, Britain was able to divert more of its resources to the struggle for trade and colonies. The Seven Years War of 1756–63 left the British in control of most of North America, and, although they lost nearly all their American colonies in the new world war of 1776–83, they held on to what became Canada and also the British West Indies. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars of 1793 to 1815 brought long periods of isolation and economic crisis for the British but also, eventually, overwhelming victory. French seapower was shattered and Britain was left as the world’s main colonial power, paramount in India but also well-entrenched in Australasia and southern Africa. Its fleet, previously based mostly at home and in the Baltic and Mediterranean, was now spread around the globe. In 1848 only 35 warships were in home waters and 31 in the Mediterranean. There were 27 on the West Africa station, 10 at the Cape of Good Hope, 25 in the East Indies and China, 10 in the West Indies, 14 in South America and 12 in the Pacific.⁷ Their ability to command the seas depended on holding what Admiral Sir John Fisher was later to call the ‘five strategic keys’ that ‘lock up the world’ – the great British bases at Dover, Gibraltar, Alexandria, the Cape of Good Hope and Singapore.⁸

Established in key points around the globe, able to reach out through a strong navy and merchant marine, Britain after 1815 also enjoyed the advantage of being the world’s first industrial nation. This position was intimately bound up with commercial hegemony. From the late eighteenth century the country’s initial industrial surge was stimulated by cotton manufacture. All the raw material was imported and most production was for export. By 1830 half the value of British exports came from cotton goods and raw cotton made up 20 per cent of net imports. As the cotton boom waned by the 1840s so iron and steel became the new growth sector, stimulated particularly by the railway-building manias of the 1830s and 1840s and then by British dominance in the construction and financing of railways around the world. By 1860 a country with only 2 per cent of the world’s population was generating about one-fifth of Europe’s total gross national product (GNP), producing half the world’s iron and steel and accounting for 40 per cent of world trade in manufactured goods. It had the highest GNP in the world and its population enjoyed the highest average per capita income. Britain’s dominance of the world economy in the mid-nineteenth century was greater than that of the USA at its peak a century later.⁹

So, in the mid-Victorian era Britain seemed truly great. It was the dominant sea power, the leading colonial power and the world’s industrial giant. Economic strength and a well-grounded system of national debt had enabled it to see off the challenge from Napoleon. In the decades after 1815 the Royal Navy did seem to rule the waves, sweeping piracy from the Indian Ocean and China Seas, combatting the slave traders in the Caribbean and South Atlantic, and advancing British mercantile interests, particularly in the ‘Opium War’ of 1839–42 to open up China to British trade. Many foreign leaders had no doubt that British power was decisive. Only England, mistress of the seas, can protect us against the united force of European reaction,’ exclaimed Simon Bolivar, the liberator of South America, as he contemplated the threat of Spanish reconquest, while Muhammad Ali, the Ottomans’ unruly viceroy of Egypt, observed, ‘with the English for my friends I can do anything: without their friendship I can do nothing’.¹⁰ Like Rome, Britain seemed to rule or shape much of the world, what Tennyson celebrated in 1886 as

… the mightiest Ocean-power on earth

Our own fair isle, the lord of every sea.¹¹

Politician Joseph Chamberlain simply called it the ‘Pax Britannica’.

The sensation of national power seemed most palpable during the celebrations for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in June 1897. A week of festivities ended with a vast naval pageant off the Isle of Wight when the Queen reviewed 165 of her ships manned by 40 000 men. But the highpoint was 22 June when Her Majesty processed in state through six miles of London streets amid cheering crowds. The capital had spent a quarter of a million pounds on street decorations, many of them illuminated by the latest miracle of British industrialism, the electric light bulb. For mos...