Lion Rampant

Essays in the Study of British Imperialism

D.A. Low

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781136273667
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1973. Part of the studies in Commonwealth Politics and History series, this volume is a collection of essays with the topics of Empire and authority, social engineering, traditional rulership, Christianity, the sequence in the demission of power, and the political aftermath of the British Empire.

1

Empire and Authority

When they discuss questions of political power and political authority, most political scientists are able to refer to a substantial corpus of literature. There is no such corpus of literature about imperial authority.¹ There is plenty of writing about the doctrine of indirect rule. Most of this skirts, however, the central issues of imperial authority. Among historians there is now a growing literature about ‘resistance’ and ‘revolt’.² But what of the long intervals when there was next to none such? One vital problem concerning imperial authority has of course received attention (a tremendous amount of attention indeed) from both political scientists and historians alike, namely the question why and how it has now been so largely overthrown. By and large we think we know the answer to this. We explain it by the rise of nationalism. But the truth probably is that we have not really gone nearly as far as we think we have in fathoming it adequately. For we have still to learn a great deal more about that other question, namely, not why imperial rule has been overthrown, but why it was in the first place (and let us for the moment beg the question here) accepted.

The essential issue in all this can be very simply illustrated with just one question. How was it possible that 760 British members of the ruling Indian Civil Service could as late as 1939, in the face of the massive force of the Indian national movement led by Gandhi ‘hold down’ 378 million Indians?³ For all the work done on British administration in India, and upon Indian nationalism, we cannot yet—and by ‘we’ I mean chiefly ‘we historians’—answer that question. We can note that the Indian army, the Indian police and the Indian provincial services remained remarkably ‘loyal’ to the British through each of the Indian National Congress’s successive Civil Disobedience movements against the Raj,⁴ and with Percival Spear⁵ we may recall that ‘the uncommitted majority of the [Indian] articulate class … still stopped short of violence and revolution’ as late as 1942 when Gandhi launched his explosive ‘Quit India’ movement. But we still remain abysmally ignorant about how the Raj’s political domination was articulated beneath the British district officer through various networks of locally prominent families, subordinate Indian bureaucracies, and rural dominant castes, and until we know a great deal more about this, any account of Indian politics in the British period will be open to substantial amendment.⁶ It is not the purpose of this present chapter to try to close the gap. But this is very much the kind of issue which will eventually require elucidation, even when, as at present, it only seems possible to reconnoitre some of the issues to which it relates.

This chapter accordingly seeks to do no more than three things. To offer in the first place a typology—if the term may be allowed—of initial imperial situations: secondly, to discuss some of the factors which, in the British Empire at least, went to the establishment of its authority over Asian and African peoples: and then thirdly to consider, on the basis of some historical studies of Uganda, the significance for an imperial historian of the points which look as if they need to be made about the ‘intensity’ of imperial power.

Initial Imperial Situations

From a consideration of a substantial number of instances it would seem that one can differentiate between three different kinds of initial imperial situation:

1. Where an imperial power superseded a pre-existing political authority

2. Where an imperial power established its dominance over a pre-existing political authority which continued to exist, but under its dominance; and

3. Where there were no distinctly political authorities to be either superseded or subordinated, only stateless societies, so that the imperial power was engaged in the extremely difficult task of creadng a distinctly political authority for the first time.

A few words about each will be in order.

The situation where an imperial power superseded a preexisting political authority did not necessarily involve the supersession by the imperial power of a political authority which was previously paramount. The East India Company, for instance, for half a century and more after the Battle of Plassey (1757) continued to acknowledge the paramountcy of the successors of the Mughal Emperors. They superseded, however, those who were the Emperors’ subordinates. In Bengal, for instance, they superseded the Nawab as the Mughal Emperor’s Dewan there. In general, however, this first type of imperial situation came into existence where the imperial power did supersede a pre-existing paramount authority. The remnant of the authority of the Mughal Emperors in India was in fact eventually done away with, and in due course British Emperors of India succeeded Mughal Emperors as the paramount power there. In India this was a protracted proceeding. It began with Warren Hastings’s efforts to secure the safety of the British East India Company during the wars of the 1770s and 1780s, which had the effect of making the Company the pre-eminent ‘country power’ in India. Only with Wellesley and Marquess Hastings in the first twenty years of the nineteenth century, however, did the Company, by superseding several of the other ‘country powers’, establish itself as paramount in most parts of India east of the Indus valley; and even then it continued until 1857 to grant a certain (albeit drastically reduced) status to the Kings of Delhi (as the lineal successors to the Mughals were called):⁷ while it was not until the 1840s that it finally superseded the rulers of Sind and the Punjab to the westward.⁸

Nevertheless India, or to be precise British India—as distinct from the Indian Princely States—probably provides the classic example of this type of initial imperial situation in the British Empire. In India the British succeeded to the paramount traditional authority of the Indian State. One can see the point here very clearly in the operation of the Indian land revenue system. In India there was an intimate relation between land and taxation (there was no such relation in Africa, where the basic taxation was not land revenue, but first the hut tax and then the poll tax), and what happened was that the British simply took over the traditional role of the Indian State in regard to land, and claimed—and received—the share (or at least something which approximated to the share) of the produce of the soil which had traditionally been the State’s perquisite.⁹

But this same imperial situation was to be found occasionally in Africa as well. In Southern Rhodesia, for instance, Rhodes and the British South Africa Company in the 1890s succeeded Lobengula, the paramount chief of the major tribe, the Ndebele, as the paramount authority between the Limpopo and the Zambezi. In two wars—the Ndebele War of 1893 and the Ndebele Rebellion of 1896—the Ndebele were severely defeated, and their traditional political authorities destroyed. The royal salute of the Ndebele was the cry ‘Bayete’. When in 1902 Rhodes was buried in the Matopo Hills in Southern Rhodesia, his body was carried to its hill-top tomb by Ndebele warriors crying ‘Bayete, Bayete’; Rhodes was given, that is, the Ndebele royal salute.¹⁰ The last paramount chief of the Ndebele was thus, in a very real sense, not Lobengula, but Rhodes; and the thinking of the Ndebele seems to have been that this white man, despite all that he had done to them, had succeeded by right of conquest (a right the Ndebele themselves fully recognised, for they had often profited from it themselves) to political authority over them. In Southern Rhodesia, as in British India, imperial power thus rested, in the first instance, upon the supersession by the imperial power of a pre-existing political authority. And this seems very often to have been the basis of French imperial power, since the French do not appear to have been as ready as the British to work the second kind of imperial situation.

This was the situation in which an imperial power did not supersede a pre-existing political authority, but established its dominance over a pre-existing political authority which continued to exist under its dominance. The classic form here was represented by those situations in which a ‘native state’ continued to exist under the aegis of the imperial power (though there were other variants as well). The point to be stressed is that, in terms of the autonomy which the native state enjoyed, there were many variations to be found in this second type of imperial situation. If some of these—for the British Empire at least—were placed upon a scale, it might run something like this. At one end there were the Persian Gulf Sheikhdoms. Here British control was limited to control over their foreign relations: there was no interference with their internal administration.¹¹ Next there came the Princely States of the British Empire in India. Here again, British authorities controlled their external relations, but not their internal affairs. The British did, however, claim to exercise ‘paramountcy’ over the Princely States, and this amounted to an assertion of the right to interfere in internal affairs if they were convinced that maladministration and/or injustice were rampant.¹²

In Africa, British dominance generally amounted to more than this. Here we can pick out four more situations all further up the scale. First Egypt, where, in the days of Cromer and his successors, a clear separation was supposed to exist between the British diplomatic representatives on the one hand and the Egyptian Government on the other. Cromer, after all, was officially never anything more than British Consul-General in Cairo, and Egypt continued throughout his period to be part of the Ottoman Empire. De facto, of course, Cromer was ‘Viceroy’ of Egypt. What was more, the Egyptian Government had British officials attached to its ministries whose advice had to be accepted, so that in practice there was substantially more direct British control over the internal affairs of Egypt than in normal circumstances there ever was over the Indian States.¹³

The kingdoms of Uganda presented a somewhat parallel, though clearly distinct, situation. Here, by contrast with Egypt in Cromer’s day, a British Protectorate existed: and by a treaty signed in 1900 (an extraordinarily ambiguous treaty as it happened) the authorities of the foremost native state, Buganda, were required ‘to cooperate loyally with Her Majesty’s Government in the organisation and administration of the kingdom’. For the most part, however, no British officials worked, as they did in Egypt, within the native state government, and to an even greater extent than in Egypt there were two parallel structures of government operating side by side.¹⁴ It is a little difficult to decide whether Buganda should be placed above or below Egypt, but at all events it stood somewhere near the middle of the scale.

Next would be placed Northern Nigeria, the nursery (in the horticultural sense) of Lord Lugard’s theories of Indirect Rule. Here his purpose was to establish one structure of government:¹⁵ a contrast with both Egypt and Buganda. Certainly relations between the British and the Northern Nigerian Emirates were not—as with the Uganda kingdoms—governed by Treaty and so to some degree limited. The governments of the Northern Nigerian emirates were directly subject to British authority. Addressing the conquered of Sokoto in Northern Nigeria on 21 March 19...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Empire and Authority
• 2 Empire and Social Engineering
• 3 Empire and Traditional Rulership
• 4 Empire and Christianity
• 5 Sequence in the Demission of Power
• 6 Political Authority in the Aftermath of Empire
• Index