British Imperialism

1688-2015

P.J. Cain, A. G. Hopkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317389248
• Edition: 3
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

A milestone in the understanding of British history and imperialism, this ground-breaking book radically reinterprets the course of modern economic development and the causes of overseas expansion during the past three centuries. Employing their concept of 'gentlemanly capitalism', the authors draw imperial and domestic British history together to show how the shape of the nation and its economy depended on international and imperial ties, and how these ties were undone to produce the post-colonial world of today.

Containing a significantly expanded and updated Foreword and Afterword, this third edition assesses the development of the debate since the book's original publication, discusses the imperial era in the context of the controversy over globalization, and shows how the study of the age of empires remains relevant to understanding the post-colonial world. Covering the full extent of the British empire from China to South America and taking a broad chronological view from the seventeenth century to post-imperial Britain today, British Imperialism: 1688–2015 is the perfect read for all students of imperial and global history.

Part One Introduction, 1688–1914

The Problem and the Context

DOI: 10.4324/9781315677798-1

In a decolonised world the empire no longer strikes back, but there is a sense in which it lives on after its demise. The present generation, the first in Britain for some 300 years to survey a world without prominent imperial landmarks, has seen a remarkable increase of interest in the empire, as witness the formidably impressive volume of historical research published since the 1950s and the growth of public nostalgia for a world we have lost and, in some respects, may never have had. Given that the explosion of research can intimidate as well as aid further scholarship and that the imperial content of novels and television programmes may be approaching saturation level, the appearance of yet another book on British imperialism needs an explicit justification beyond that provided by the enduring importance of the subject itself. In the case of a general work, such as this one, good cause can be shown either by updating previous surveys or by venturing a new interpretation. It is difficult to say which is the more hazardous enterprise: the former threatens to bury the surveyor alive under an avalanche of specialised research which descends faster than it can be moved; the latter offers the prospect of ordeal by public exposure, a fate reserved for those who suppose that they have something new to say on a topic which, being so vast, has absorbed novelties from more ingenious minds in the course of the past century.

Well might prospective authors pause before setting course for a journey which harbours such irreducible risks. Our own route follows the high road in search of novelty but also scans the alternatives by synthesising a good deal of detailed research. Whether this decision provides insurance against disaster, or compounds the risk by inviting two fates instead of one, is for readers to judge. Our aspiration developed, not out of a sense of superior vision, but from a need to address some basic anomalies in existing explanations of the impulse towards imperial expansion; our commitment took shape when our lectures on this subject, having reached the high point of exegesis so readily inspired by criticism of others, were eventually brought down to earth by the formidable and protracted task of constructing an alternative. This sobering experience has enhanced our appreciation of the contribution made by our predecessors, even where we disagree with them. Indeed, the fact that there have been so few attempts to offer a fundamental reappraisal of the causes of British imperialism during the century which has passed since Sir John Seeley published The Expansion of England suggests just how extraordinarily difficult it is to devise an interpretation which combines an awareness of the detailed literature with a measure of independence from existing approaches, whether marked out by apologists or by enemies of empire.¹

The discussion which follows seeks to place our own contribution in its wider analytical framework. We begin by setting the issue we have chosen to address, that of the causes of imperialism, in its historiographical context and by outlining the evolution of our own views on the subject. Any interpretation of a problem as vast as this one necessarily involves the use of correspondingly large terms which, if left undefined, may confuse the reader and which, if improperly defined, may also prejudice the argument. The rest of the chapter is therefore devoted to laying out for inspection the assumptions and concepts which underpin our interpretation. We continue by defining our use of the term ‘capitalism’ and by drawing attention to its hitherto underemphasised non-industrial forms. This discussion leads to a consideration of the social agents of capitalist enterprise, and here we lay stress on the concept of gentility and its relationship to economic activity and political authority. The implication of this approach, that manufacturing interests had less influence on the formulation of economic and international policy than has usually been assumed, is then made explicit, though this conclusion is not to be read as an attempt to minimise the importance of the process of industrialisation. We next examine the overseas manifestations of what we term ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ by looking specifically at the concept of imperialism and at its various guises. Finally, since the whole of this discussion rests upon a view of what constitutes historical explanation, we conclude with a brief statement of our methodology, not to promote the claims we make but to enable readers to evaluate them.

The historiographical setting

The difficulty of making an effective case for looking at the causes of British imperialism afresh may suggest that the answers are already known, or at least that one interpretation has come to dominate the subject to the extent of threatening to make its rivals redundant. There have certainly been times when a particularly illuminating thesis has gained majority support among liberals or radicals (though never among both). But no solution has proved to be permanent, and if there is one judgement that scholars of different persuasions can agree on today it is that no such certainties exist at present. Specialists will have their own explanations of why the growth of knowledge should have brought less, and not more, coherence to historical understanding. Our own argument will be that the central weakness in existing accounts of overseas expansion and imperialism is that they underplay or misjudge the relationship between the British economy and Britain’s presence abroad. Putting the metropolitan economy back at the centre of the analysis, we suggest, makes it possible to establish a new framework for interpreting Britain’s historic role as a world power.

Writers in the Marxist tradition cannot, of course, be accused of underplaying this relationship, but in our view they often misjudge both the development of the British economy and its links with overseas expansion. The classical theories of Marxist imperialism will be considered later, but it is clear that their modern successors have allotted a crucial role to industrialisation in precipitating imperialism² and that this position, as we shall try to demonstrate, is ill-founded. Neo-Marxist analyses of imperialism suffer from other serious weaknesses. Key terms such as ‘capitalism’ are insufficiently defined and are applied with too much generality to retain their explanatory power;³ the use made of historical evidence is at times quixotic;⁴ and a primary concern with the underdevelopment of regions outside Europe has led to a stereotyped view of the ‘exploiting metropole’.⁵ Although these interpretations have achieved considerable popularity in recent years, it is perhaps worth noting that their greatest influence has been on social scientists other than historians.

The large number of scholars who deny the existence of a close relationship between the development of the home economy and imperialist forms of expansion draw on two influential traditions. The first, which prevailed down to the 1950s, confined the study of imperialist impulses to the creation and evolution of colonies which made up the constitutional empire.⁶ This definition gave the presentation of imperial history a political and legal bias, and this was reinforced by the fact that economic history was still in its infancy. In a world of shifting concepts the formal empire, the area painted red on the map, had a reassuringly solid physical presence. On inspection, however, its limitations readily became apparent. In the first place, the constitutional standing of the member-countries was neither identical nor fixed. Some parts of the empire rose to dominion status and acquired considerable formal control over their own affairs; others remained crown colonies, governed from London and subordinated in all significant matters of policy to decisions made in Westminster; in between were various intermediate categories, such as protectorates, mandates and condominiums.⁷ Historians usually deal with this problem by sorting the empire into different constitutional groups. This strategy serves for narrative purposes, but it leaves untouched the central issue of the degree of control exercised by the centre, for this is not necessarily measured by an index of constitutional standing.

The second important influence stems from the work of Robinson and Gallagher, which has set the agenda for the study of imperial history during the last forty years. Robinson and Gallagher were the first historians to give prominence to the distinction between the formal empire of legal control and the ‘informal’ empire of influence and were also the progenitors of the ‘peripheral’ or ‘excentric’ theory of imperialism.⁸ The concept of informality has helped to define imperial history in terms of the various frontiers and peripheries which were created or touched by the foreign presence. In doing so, it has greatly enlarged the earlier orthodoxy, with its narrow focus on political formalities. According to Robinson and Gallagher, the formal empire was the tip of an iceberg: submerged below the waterline lurked the invisible or informal empire, which at times was larger than the area under sovereign control. Members of the informal empire saw neither colonial governors nor colonial tax-gatherers, but they remained, nevertheless, under London’s economic, cultural or diplomatic dominion. The notion of informal empire has prompted a long-running debate between its advocates, for whom the invisible has indeed materialised, and the sceptics, who question the validity of elevating an informal presence to imperial status. The controversy has flagged in recent years, not least because of the admitted difficulty of giving precision to such a broad concept;⁹ but the debate has been invaluable in underlining the importance of considering shades of influence, degrees of effective control and measures of diminished sovereignty. In theory at least, it is now hard, though not impossible, to write a naive history of British imperialism.

The coverage offered by the present study examines the central issue of the exercise of power in international relations by considering both regions which were brought into the formal empire and those which remained outside it. We accept, of course, the need to give prominence to the constitutional empire because of its collective importance, whatever measure is chosen, in the history of British imperial expansion. Accordingly, we have examined the leading constituents, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and Africa, in some detail, though our survey of the empire is not fully comprehensive.¹⁰ Outside the formal empire, we have chosen as case studies South America, China and the Ottoman Empire, regions where Britain’s presence was both prominent and subject to keen rivalry from other foreign powers. Following our previous discussion, we do not assume that effective influence within the empire can be easily inferred from the constitutional status of the territory concerned; nor do we begin by supposing that Britain’s informal influence automatically gave her an informal empire. Our procedure, in both cases, is to consider what Britain’s interests were, how they were represented, and with what results in terms of limiting the independence of other countries. This involves an assessment, where the evidence permits, of different levels of influence – from the ‘rules of the game’ governing international relations to business pressures and domestic political decisions.

According to Robinson and Gallagher, the extension of informal empire was the outstanding feature of Britain’s expansion overseas after 1815. They linked the spread of informal control to Britain’s growing need for new markets and sources of supply as industrialisation proceeded, though without specifying the precise relation between the changing economy and the informally dominated frontier. On this view, informal empire was preferred to formal rule largely because it was cheap; but informal control could be exercised only if the frontier territory was both willing and able to cope with the impact of Britain’s invading influence by throwing up local collaborators. However, despite linking the expansion of both formal and informal empire before 1870 to the process of economic development, and especially to industrialisation, Robinson and Gallagher claimed that economic or social change in Britain was of insufficient importance thereafter to account for the rapid expansion of formal empire in Africa and Asia at the close of the century. Instead, they directed attention to the periphery and, in particular, to the collapse of the collaborative regimes which had sustained Britain’s informal presence, to the activities of independent (or at least semi-independent) sub-imperialists on the frontiers, and to Britain’s need to counter the expansive tendencies of other industrialising nations which established themselves as world powers for the first time after 1870. One clear implication of this analysis was that the growth of the formal empire was a product of Britain’s relative decline as a great power: the extension of sovereignty in Africa was only a poor recompense for the shrinkage of the informal economic empire elsewhere. This ‘peripheral’ theory of imperialism has informed many of the major recent studies of both European and British expansion overseas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹¹

The peripheral interpretation was an understandable and appropriate response to two powerful contemporary influences. The first, the intellectual climate created by the Cold War, produced an awareness of Britain’s own subordination to the United States and provoked a reaction to Marxist theories, and especially to their metropolitan-based determinism and often cavalier treatment of evidence. The second influence sprang from decolonisation, which encouraged a shift away from traditional imperial history and created a new interest in the history of former colonial territories. By combining opposition to the intellectual dirigisme of Marxism with the fruits of fresh research on and beyond the frontiers of empire, the peripheral thesis offered an appealing way of updating liberal interpretations of imperialism. Any analysis of imperialism advanced today undoubtedly needs to demonstrate an awareness of the now considerable literature connecting European interests and indigenous societies.

To accept this point, however, is not necessarily to accept the peripheral thesis, any more than to establish a metropolitan economic basis for imperialism is to embrace Marxism. Precise judgement on this issue depends on the exact weight attributed to the periphery as a cause of imperialism, and on this matter proponents of the thesis speak with different inflections. Dilute versions amount to a plea for incorporating new evidence on the turbulent frontier by making space for the part played by s...