Global Expansion

Britain and its Empire, 1870–1914

Willie Thompson

Pluto Press
LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA
First published 1999 by Pluto Press
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and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA

Copyright © Willie Thompson 1999

The right of Willie Thompson to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Thompson, Willie.
Global expansion : Britain and its empire, 1870–1914 / Willie Thompson.
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ISBN 0–7453–1240–3
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Contents

Chronology vii
Preface viii

Introduction 1

1. The British Empire on the Eve 15

2. The Drive into Africa 30

3. Other Extensions 45

4. The Evolved Imperial Structure 59

5. Imperial Relations 79

6. Significance of Empire 102

Notes 110
Select Bibliography 119
Appendix I – Maps 121
Appendix II – Tables 128

Index 132
Chronology

1869 – Suez Canal opened.

1872 – Disraeli’s Crystal Palace speech.
1872 – Sir Bartle Frere signs anti-slavery treaty with Sultan of Zansibar.
1875 – Disraeli purchases block of Suez Canal shares.
1877 – Unsuccessful British attempt to annex Boer republics.
1879 – Anglo-French control over Egyptian finances.
1879 – Zulu War.
1882 – Egypt invaded and taken under British control.
1884–85 – Berlin Congress establishes rules for African partition, hands over Congo
basin to Leopold II.
1885 – General Gordon killed in Khartoum.
1886 – Upper Burma annexed.
1886 – Sir George Goldie receives Royal Charter, begins to extend control over
Nigeria.
1886 – Transvaal goldfields opened.
1888 – Protectorates over northern Borneo.
1888 – William Mackinnon receives Royal Charter, unsuccessfully probes into
Great Lakes region.
1889 – Cecil Rhodes receives Royal Charter, begins conquest of Matebeleland.
1889–90 – Anglo-French territorial agreements on West Africa.
1890 – Anglo-German territorial agreements on East Africa.
1891 – Nyasaland acquired as protectorate.
1895 – Uganda acquired as protectorate.
1895 – British overrun Ashanti and annex to Gold Coast.
1896 – Conquest of Sudan begins.
1896 – British-controlled Malaya organised as Federation of Malay States.
1897–9 – European scramble for concessions in China.
1898 – Territorial disputes with French on Niger.
1898 – Sudan conquered.
1898 – Fashoda Crisis – confrontation with French expedition on the Upper Nile.
1899 – Anglo-French territorial agreements on Sudan.
1899 – South African War (Boer War) begins.
1899 – Withdrawal of Royal Niger Company charter.
1900 – Australian colonies federated.
1900 – European states co-operate to suppress Chinese national rebellion (Boxer
Rising).
1902 – South African War ends.
1907 – Anglo-Russian entente effectively partitions Persia.
1908 – Young Turk revolution.
1909 – Further British acquisitions in Malaya.
1910 – Union of South Africa.
1911 – Revolution in China.
Preface

This short volume focuses upon the British empire and the development
and growth of the country’s imperial system between 1870 and the out-
break of World War I, in the context of historically unprecedented global
expansion by certain European powers. The British was incomparably the
largest both in area and population of the European overseas empires of
that period (and the land-based territorial expansions of the United States
and the Russian empire). The historical meaning of what was taking place
is of course only understandable in the context of the parallel activities of
these other European powers – resulting from time to time in clashes and
confrontations between rival empire-builders – and also, it must be stressed,
in the historical novelty of the international imperial framework which
emerged during those years. As is explained in the Introduction, the Brit-
ish empire, from its beginnings a commercial enterprise, had been central
to the growth of Britain as an industrial power from the eighteenth to the
middle of the nineteenth century, but from the 1870s it began to take on a
new form and character.
In pursuing this theme an immediate problem of definition has to be
noted. Britain’s ‘imperial system’, amazingly complex though it was, is rela-
tively straightforward to recognise, but ‘imperialism’, the word which was
increasingly used to define the newly developing state of affairs, is a much
vaguer and more nebulous concept – though no less of a reality. Clearly it
has economic, political, cultural and military dimensions; it has implica-
tions in all of these for the imperial country no less than the subjected ter-
ritories – and the latter may include formally independent states as well as
those over which the imperial metropolis claims legal sovereignty.
At this point the difficulties are only beginning. The initial problem can
be solved in a rough and ready manner on the analogy of the elephant – it
may be hard or even impossible to propose a precise definition, but it is
easy enough to recognise the creature when it actually presents itself. Much
more problematic is to explain what was taking place. Did the 1870s
really mark a significant break with what had gone before? If they did, what
accounted for the expansion of European power by conquest or diplomacy
over virtually every region of the globe? What were the meaning and con-
sequences of the process for the populations which experienced the im-
pact of this power? Was the escalation in international tensions which
finally exploded in 1914 connected to such processes, either tightly or

viii
 Preface ix

loosely? What if anything distinguished the expansion of British imperial

power from that of France, Germany, Portugal, Italy or Belgium?
A prodigious quantity of research and writing has been devoted to try-
ing to answer these and similar questions since the first general interpre-
tations of imperialism began to appear in the early part of the twentieth
century. Even the literature on particular aspects is vast. According to
Andrew Porter, ‘the secondary literature on the economics of empire-build-
ing is staggering in its extent, and is already the subject of valuable general
surveys, both bibliographical and analytical’.1 His short volume just quoted
lists a bibliography of 321 items, most of them recent.
Historians learn to distrust apparent discontinuities in the historical
record, and certainly strong continuities can always be found between
different phases of historical development, but it is hard to avoid the con-
clusion that a marked change of tempo occurred during the last third of
the nineteenth century in several dimensions of European reality – in the
functioning of its economic systems, the nature of the relationship between
its sovereign states, the internal character of and the interaction between
its social classes, and the political and cultural outlook of its masses. The
word ‘imperialism’ sums up the nature of that transformation. The eco-
nomic framework of the change is sketched in Chapter 1, primarily so far
as it concerned Britain.
For subsequent generations of historians and political analysts the de-
bate around imperialism has been dominated, whether through repulsion
or attraction, by Lenin’s pamphlet of 1916, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of
Capitalism. Much of that debate has been directed towards substantiating,
modifying or refuting its theses. As several historians, both Marxist and
non-Marxist, have pointed out,2 Lenin wrote this massively researched
pamphlet (the notes compiled in preparation run to over 700 printed pages)
not to explain the history of colonial expansion but the reasons for the
outbreak of general European war and the reasons why the proletariats of
Europe mostly supported their governments in waging it. Nevertheless, it
does assert a strong connection between the consolidation of monopoly
capitalism, the export of capital and the seizure of colonies in the late nine-
teenth century. All of these things were certainly evident phenomena of
the period: the question is whether they were causally related.
The lack of consensus on this argument persists, and this volume is not
concerned to resolve it. Nevertheless, even in what is primarily a descrip-
tive account of one particular imperialism, the issue unavoidably lurks in
the background, and my own general standpoint will become clear in the
course of the text. For the moment, however, personal observation may be
in order.
x Preface

Although this particular issue has not been central to my academic con-
cerns, it is one in which I have continued to be interested since my under-
graduate years. It intrigued me both because that time coincided with the
early 1960s and the height of decolonisation struggles in Africa and be-
cause the imperialism of the 1870–1914 era appeared so significant for the
subsequent history of the twentieth century. At that time I read Lenin’s
Imperialism, which did indeed seem to supply the key to understanding
what had happened – but not for long. It became clear from the criticisms
which were being directed at it at the time that – whatever the other mer-
its of the pamphlet might be – as an explanation for what had happened in
Africa and the other parts of the globe which had fallen under colonial
rule at that time it could not stand up. The problem for me was that all the
alternative explanations on offer appeared even less convincing.
I continued to struggle with the problem for some time. The equivalent
of the undergraduate thesis, the ‘special subject’ which I opted for under
the notable Africanist J. D. Hargreaves was ‘the Partition of Africa’, and my
Ph.D. subject dealt with commercial connections between Glasgow and
Africa during the late nineteenth century. In the end, however, not being
able to see any solution, I moved my academic interests into other areas of
history.
In the following years, however, research, debate and dialogue under-
taken both by Marxist and non-Marxist historians has enormously ex-
tended the detailed knowledge of what was involved in imperial expan-
sion and consolidation. It has demonstrated, I think beyond argument,
that there is no all-encompassing explanation which will account for ev-
ery territorial extension and every aspect of imperial functioning on the
part of Britain, let alone of the entire imperialist system. On the other hand
(though there would be no agreement on this) it is my view that it is pos-
sible to identify a framework, a model of how the imperial states operated
as a global system at this stage of their evolution, which does explain the
general drive and outcome of developments. That framework is based upon
the concept of ‘regimes of accumulation’, a modified form of the model
propounded by Giovanni Arrighi, as explained in the Introduction to this
volume, not forgetting that it was taking place not as a purely economic
phenomenon but in a context of competitive power relations between the
major states.
However, it has to be emphasised that the concern here is not primarily
with general theoretical models, but rather with a lower level of particular
explanations for more specific developments and outcomes which pro-
vides a satisfactory picture of how and why imperial concerns, both for-
mal and informal, became an increasingly important dimension of Brit-
 Preface xi

ish public and private life, absorbed so much of political discourse and
penetrated so deeply into civil society during the years in question. Chap-
ters 2 and 3 consider how the new British empire of the late nineteenth
century, both formal and informal, was acquired, Chapter 4 examines how
the parts of the conglomerate, old and new, actually operated, and Chap-
ter 5 considers the political repercussions both for international relations
and for British politics.
In addition to an explanatory purpose, this volume is also intended to
serve as a reminder. When formal empires were being dismantled, par-
ticularly in the early 1960s, imperialism was a politically discredited no-
tion, scorned and repudiated everywhere except the untouchable right,
and the imperial powers which tried to hang on to their colonies, such as
Portugal, were looked upon as exceptionally reprobate. Of late, however,
a retrospective glow of sentiment or even outright endorsement of the
imperial era has been observable among right-wing historians and politi-
cians in Britain. The British empire has been validated either explicitly or
by implication by historians such as the late Max Beloff. Niall Ferguson
has argued that it would have been appropriate to make a deal with the
Kaiser in 1914 to ensure its preservation. John Charmley and Alan Clark
have advanced similar theses in relation to Hitler in 1940. Even what were
formerly regarded on all sides as wholly indefensible imperial regimes have
been hotly defended in recent publications, such as by John Cann in rela-
tion to Portugal.
This volume is intended to counter any such nostalgia and to make clear
the extent to which the British empire (no less than its counterparts) was
first and foremost established by predatory methods and designed to fulfil
the purposes of the imperial power ‘without compassion or compunction’
and without regard to the welfare of its subjects (apart from British de-
scended settlers), any benefits accruing to them being incidental by-prod-
ucts. It was a regime, for the non-European populations which fell into its
grasp, of terror, oppression, starvation, forced labour, cultural annihila-
tion, degradation and intermittent genocide – and this is not to ignore
palliative actions by government officials or missionary bodies, or that
‘developmental’ gains might also be secured. Nor is it to ignore the fact
that there were individuals and organisations in the imperial metropolis
combating the imperial drive, but regrettably there is little evidence that
they much affected the progress of empire – any more than Noam Chomsky
appears to be able to influence the current practices of the US government.
It is true that few of the perpetrators were conscious sadists, any more than
were mineowners who in the early nineteenth century sent children down
the pits, they did what was required of them by the system in which they
xii Preface

operated. It is also a truism of historical method that ‘the historian is not a

judge, still less a hanging judge’, and certainly explanation always has to
take priority over moral censure. Nevertheless, no reputable historian writes
about the workings of the Third Reich without adopting a moral stand-
point on the subject and would be rightly condemned if they failed to do
so – though of course their position need not be and should not be explic-
itly underlined in every paragraph. The British empire, whatever its level
of depravity, was not the Third Reich; but the European empires provided
the seedbed for the techniques of domination and the attitudes of mind
which made the Third Reich possible.3
For reasons of space and manageability the focus of this volume is largely
confined to the imperial initiatives from the British state and private ad-
venturers, relations with rival imperial powers and the imperial culture as
it developed within the UK. It discusses too the fate of the victims, but deals
only marginally with the context of their pre-colonial past or the resis-
tance that they offered to the colonisation process. The nature of those
societies was of course portrayed in colonial discourse as repulsive or con-
temptible and their human merits dismissed – for example one of the
favourite pretexts for territorial seizures in East Africa was to suppress the
thriving combined trade in slaves and ivory conducted there by Arab
merchants. However, discussion of the pre-colonial societies is an extended
and complex field into which it is not possible to enter here.
The great historian Elie Halevy entitled one of the volumes in his ‘His-
tory of England since 1815’ series Imperialism and the Rise of Labour. The
two items of the title, however, tended to be juxtaposed only in time, for
the rise of labour in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did
not much impinge on the development of imperialist culture – rather
the reverse relationship. Despite the fact that there were oppositional
organisations and individuals which indicted imperialism, the labour
organisations of the time, including the socialist ones, tended to concen-
trate upon national perspectives and largely take the empire for granted –
where it was discussed it tended to be under the presumption that British
tutelage would have to be continued indefinitely, though particular hor-
rors might be denounced.4 Even the international syndicalist movement
which emerged in the early years of the twentieth century largely con-
fined its attention to white industrial workers. For these reasons British
socialism or socialists scarcely feature in this volume. Blindness towards
the realities and meaning of imperialism and colonial conquest did in-
deed constitute a major gap in the perceptions of the nascent labour move-
ment, and one for which it was to pay dearly in subsequent decades – but
consideration of that also lies beyond our scope.
 Preface xiii

I would like to acknowledge the assistance of all who have been concerned
in the conception and preparation of this book, but especially the editors
at Pluto Press for their long-suffering patience.
Introduction

The late nineteenth-century writings of Joseph Conrad are recognised as

being evidently ‘imperial novels for imperial times, dealing with the Brit-
ish Empire, its trade and its duties, the crises at its outposts’.1 The prov-
enance of Conrad’s world is clear, the world as seen by the colonising ac-
tors. By contrast, colonial imperialism is not generally associated with the
nightmare imaginative world of Franz Kafka, which is interpreted above
all as supplying a prophetic insight into the European dictatorships of the
twentieth century. It only requires a minor shift in perspective, however,
to recognise in Kafka’s haunted figures the general fate of any member of
the subject peoples under imperial rule. ‘He became a writer for a new time
of darkness.’2
The darkness which fell on Europe in the first half of the twentieth cen-
tury had already descended in the course of former centuries upon other
parts of the globe. ‘The terrible world of contemporary history’ was already
being experienced to the full when the twentieth century opened in Af-
rica, India and many other locations. An impenetrable and unintelligible
law administered by alien, arbitrary and totally unaccountable bureau-
crats, sucking out the life substance and the personal dignity of its victims,
summarised the reality encountered by imperial subjects not of European
descent – or even ones who were; Latin America was a locus classicis for
that sort of thing: ‘The great labyrinth of arbitrary law, the indifferent of-
ficials, the insufficient papers, the hierarchies above hierarchies, the tri-
bunals ... the wait before the door that never opens.’3 As a writer in the
Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire puts it, a colonial subject
learned that ‘law consists of the directives of the state and is a prime means
of securing its goals and exercising its powers. The colonial period pro-
vided no foundation for the use of law by citizens in defence of their rights.’4

1
2 Global Expansion

Nature of Empires

Empires of course have remained as a permanent feature of world history

since the written record began, and equally certainly the concept has meant
very diverse things at different times. Since it attempts to capture a very
diffuse reality, the term itself is rather hard to define satisfactorily, but does
imply centralised (usually monarchical) power originating in the conquest
and exploitation of politically subordinate units (usually of different cul-
tures) and maintained by force. Before the modern period, however, it does
not normally include colonisation. The beginning of empire-linked colo-
nial drive from the sixteenth century can be attributed above all to the fact
that it became possible for Europeans in centralised states to reach desir-
able territories outside the Eurasian landmass – the Americas, Australasia
and eventually parts of Africa – occupied by inhabitants who could not
hope to match European forms of weaponry.

Ancient Empires

The beginnings of literacy coincide with the emergent ancient empires

of Babylonia, Egypt, Assyria, to cite only the best remembered, and in
the east of the Eurasian continent, the great and remarkably long-lived
Han empire of China followed a little later by its Japanese counterpart.
The cultural foundations of Europe were laid in the empire established
by the Romans and its absorption of Greek and Hellenistic sources (the
word ‘imperial’ itself derives ultimately from ancient Rome). What we
classify as the European middle ages (approximately 500–1500 CE) en-
compassed the Byzantine and Holy Roman empires, the Arab empire and
its Turkish successor. Nor were empires by any means confined to the
Eurasian landmass – they appear in indigenous sub-Saharan Africa, and
famously across the Atlantic in the shape of the Mayan, the Aztec and
the Inca examples.
Many of these formations, such as those of the ancient Middle East – or
of pre-Colombian America – were little more than tribute-collecting appa-
ratuses which, once having terrorised the subject populations into acqui-
escence, took them pretty much as they found them. Others like the Ro-
man and Chinese, wholly divergent though these two examples were in
their social and economic foundations, had in common the fact that they
produced ruling elites who aimed at a significant degree of political cohe-
sion and cultural uniformity.
 Introduction 3

Medieval Empires

The same was true for medieval Europe in terms of culture, but not politi-
cal unity, for the Holy Roman empire (roughly modern Germany and Italy),
though its emperors had pretensions to exercise a suzerainty over their
brother monarchs, could never make that effective. However, medieval
western Europe, if it lacked political unity – being split into a collection of
mutually hostile kingdoms – possessed a cultural surrogate in the shape of
the Roman church. If this polity was materially and culturally less sophis-
ticated than the ancient empires, it was nonetheless technically and eco-
nomically more dynamic than any previous culture had been. It also
reached historically innovative heights of aggressive expansionism. Alien
populations on the borders defined as such by their religious difference –
Slavs, Estonians, Scandinavians, Moors – were converted, sometimes peace-
fully, but as often forcibly, to Christendom’s cultural norms, the recalci-
trant ones exterminated and replaced with settlers drawn from the inte-
rior parts of the medieval kingdoms (one of the few examples of pre-modern
colonisation in this sense). From all basic agricultural producers, free or
serf, a surplus was extracted, which, though initially appropriated by a
clerico-military aristocracy, generated impressive economic growth and
rapid social transformation. Robert Bartlett ends his comprehensive dis-
cussion of the process with the remark that

Conquest, colonization, Christianization: the techniques of settling in

a new land, the ability to maintain cultural identity through legal forms
and nurtured attitudes, the institutions and outlook required to con-
front the strange or abhorrent, to repress it and live with it, the law and
religion as well as the guns and ships. The European Christians who
sailed to the coasts of the Americas, Asia and Africa in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries came from a society that was already a colonizing
society. Europe, the initiator of one of the world’s major processes of
conquest, colonization and transformation, was also the product of
one.5

Although the medieval colonising drive occurred principally on the

southern and eastern frontiers of Latin Christendom, a variant of the same
process also took place within the British Isles. The date 1066 commemo-
rates the seizure by aggressive Norman-French feudalists of the Anglo-
Saxon state and society, which had itself been doing the same kind of thing
on the Celtic fringes of the British mainland. ‘Internal colonialism’ (dif-
fering from the modern form in that it did not aim to displace the original
4 Global Expansion

inhabitants but to impose over them a thin stratum of conquering aristo-

crats) extended also to Ireland and continued for centuries to mould the
economic and political features of what would eventually become the
British state.6

Modern Empire

What we think of as the modern world was born half a millennium ago in
an act of territorial expansionism when the Genoan adventurer Cristobal
Colomb (Christopher Columbus) pronounced the Caribbean island he
named Hispaniola to be part of the dominions of the Spanish monarchy,
so inaugurating the first of the west European seaborne empires. These were
something genuinely novel and whoever wants to understand the histori-
cal trend of the world’s development since that time has to keep them in the
foreground, for they were absolutely central. Long-distance commercial
connections overland between Europe, the Middle East and the Asian land-
mass had existed for centuries, but with the beginnings of American co-
lonisation and the near-simultaneous penetration of European traders down
the African coastline and across the Indian Ocean into southern and east-
ern Asia, the beginnings of a fully global economy made their appearance,
and may indeed be taken as the defining feature of modernity.
Streams of bullion and exotic plant commodities transformed the com-
mercial economies and through them the state systems of western Europe.7
The Anglo-Scottish state formed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries was a comparative latecomer to this form of enterprise, but once en-
tered into the contest, and capitalising on resources partly accumulated
from the epoch of internal colonialism, made spectacular progress. South
and Central America were monopolised by the imperialist firstcomers,
Spain and Portugal (though some important Caribbean islands were
snatched from them), but for English colonists having to be content in
the main with the apparently less choice parts of the Americas proved in
the end no disadvantage, for the regions along the North American sea-
board which became the English colonies turned out after all to have greater
economic potential than Mexico or South America, even as pre-industrial
economies.
What the seventeenth century had begun the eighteenth brought to tri-
umphant culmination. A succession of uniformly successful trade and
colonial wars enabled the British agrarian and commercial ruling class8 to
seize or at least infringe upon the colonial possessions and commerce of
their longer-established state rivals – the Spanish, Portuguese, French and
Dutch. By the 1760s its world trade dominance was assured, backed by a
 Introduction 5

formidable and virtually unchallengable wooden navy. The prize was

control of the commodities which formed the staples of the colonial pow-
ers’ re-export trades, American sugar, tobacco and coffee, Indian cottons,
Chinese tea and silks, East Indian spices.
The first three of these commodities were underpinned by trade of an-
other sort, giving to the Atlantic economy of the eighteenth century the
centrality it held for economic and political developments both in Europe
and globally. The plantations which produced the coffee, sugar and tobacco
of the New World were worked (like the silver mines of the initial co-
lonisation) by forced labour. This labour force was recruited at first from a
variety of sources but soon, notoriously, principally from the victims of the
West African slave trade – a form of commerce regarded by its practitioners
in the same light as any other and before the late eighteenth century looked
upon as in no way morally degrading. The unfortunates involved were pur-
chased from local potentates along the African coastline, their acquisition
did not require the actual occupation of African territory apart from a few
fortified strongholds, and it was none of the business of the slave traders to
enquire into their origins or ultimate fate. In this area too British commerce
had established its ascendancy by the eighteenth century.9

Global Markets by the Eighteenth Century

The global market of the late eighteenth century represented perhaps the
pinnacle of commercial development that was possible in a world lacking
any significant sources of artificial power and dependent as yet upon
wind, water and muscle, human or animal. Its hub was the North Atlan-
tic economy, and the the greater part of the commodities produced by
servile labour which were traded across it – sugar, rum, tobacco, coffee,
cocoa, cotton fibre – are best classified as semi-luxuries, whose most im-
portant role was not as consumption goods in the seaboard states of Eu-
rope which imported them (though naturally a portion was used in this
fashion) but as re-exports. The spokes radiating out from the hub carried
these re-exports to central and southern Europe, the Baltic, what was later
to be termed the Middle East, West Africa, southern Asia and China. Along
the spokes flowed back timber, hemp, luxury dyestuffs, brassware, wallpa-
per, finished high-quality cottons, spices, silks, tea, porcelain.

Primitive Capital Accumulation

It would, of course, be wrong to envisage merchant capital and commer-

cial imperialism as a deliberately planned regime of primitive accumula-
6 Global Expansion

tion for the Industrial Revolution10 which began to develop as the eigh-
teenth-century empire attained its apogee – any more than the canal net-
work was intended as a preliminary sketch for the succeeding railway
system. Nevertheless, it is safe to say that without the existence of that
imperial foundation the industrialisation process would have been at least
much retarded and more likely aborted altogether. Slave merchants from
Bristol financed mining and ironwork ventures in south Wales; their
Liverpool counterparts did the same thing for Lancashire cotton. Glasgow
merchants grown wealthy on tobacco imports provided the capital for
Clydeside textiles. Indian bullion manured the spreading undergrowth of
private banks in England. Above all, the slave labour force imported ini-
tially to North America to grow tobacco could be adapted to cultivate the
vegetable fibre central to the initial phase of industrialisation – raw cot-
ton. The political secession of the North American colonies in the shape
of the United States involved for a long time no basic alteration in eco-
nomic relationships.11

Regimes of Accumulation

Between its initial formation at the end of the fifteenth century and the
advanced state of development achieved three hundred years later, the glo-
bal economy continued to be based upon regimes of plunder, unashamedly
unequal exchange and forced labour. From that era of primary accumula-
tion ‘dripping with blood and dirt from every pore’, in Marx’s words,12 the
world economy perpetually expanded, consolidated and institutionalised
itself, and also underwent a process of constant transmogrification – though
it did not cease either to drip with blood and dirt.
In fact it passed through several ‘regimes of accumulation’ as I will term
them, and each of these discrete stages of development was also politically
structured. The essence of that structure was a central economy based in
one particular state whose owners of capital were thereby enabled to domi-
nate the circuits of global exchange in whatever form they assumed at
particular historical times.13 In the original manifestation it was the Span-
ish monarchy (which was not geographically confined to Spain) control-
ling the flow of bullion across the Atlantic, together with the import of
spices from eastern Asia and European commerce from its Netherlands
and Italian bases.
The second phase or regime of accumulation runs from the middle of
the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. It incorporated within
itself the older form as a subordinate element, but was more specifically
characterised by a world commerce in the semi-luxuries noted above –
 Introduction 7

tobacco, sugar, Indian cottons, Chinese silks and tea, South American cof-
fee – as well as plantation slavery and an element of trade relations with
the ancient empires of Turkey, China and Mughal India. With the Spanish
monarchy decrepit, it took time to settle which of the European states would
dominate the new structure, for it was a bitterly fought struggle between
three contenders – the Dutch Republic, which had seceded from the Span-
ish empire, France and England (or, more accurately, the Anglo-Scottish
state). The Dutch were the first to drop out and accept a secondary posi-
tion, not having the size, production or population resources to sustain a
conflict lasting a century and a half. England (now transformed into Brit-
ain) and France continued to sustain the contest throughout the course of
the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, with Britain in the more
advantageous position, until in 1815 it emerged as the clear winner, its
decisive advantages being superior financial management and naval fire-
power.
Even as this definitive supremacy was gained, the global economy and
the character of the seaborne empires which dominated it, above all the
British, stood upon the brink of a further fundamental change. Machine
industry had reached the stage of development where, manifested espe-
cially in railway systems, it was about to rise as the dominant sector in the
economies of western European states and the USA and profoundly affect
their relations with the remainder of the world. Closely tied in with this
phase of world market expansion and transformation, territorial imperi-
alism attained its zenith by the end of the century, when scarcely any
portion of the world’s surface was not subjected to the political hegemony
of one of the western nations, either directly as a colony or else controlled
informally.
The history of imperial relationships between the powers, considered
as an interlocking developing system, is an area which merits extensive
study. In this short volume however, though that is touched upon where
necessary, the focus is upon the British part of the structure, and indeed
upon its culminating phase of territorial acquisition, the years between
1870 and 1914.14

Industrial Economy

By the middle of the nineteenth century, machine industry with its associ-
ated transport and extractive systems had become the dominant sector of
the British economy and for two decades or more it was in the unique
position of being the only industrial economy in a world of agrarian trad-
ing partners, or ones still struggling to find their way along the industrial
8 Global Expansion

route. The strength and self-confidence of the country’s industrial bour-

geoisie, and the governments which responded to their importunities15
was exhibited in the dogma of free trade – a reflection of the superiority of
British manufactures and British commercial enterprise over all rivals, the
presumption that in an open market, rather than the protected ones which
had characterised the eighteenth and first part of the nineteenth century,
British entrepreneurs would invariably win.
Yet empire had by no means disappeared – in fact it had expanded. In
terms of geographical extent the Canadian territories, various West Indian
islands, Australasia, Cape Colony, together with the major part of the In-
dian subcontinent, subjugated after 1800 – not directly by the British state
but by a chartered commercial company with delegated powers – were
considerably bigger than the thirteen American colonies lost in 1783 and
in terms of population immensely more so. At the mid-point of the nine-
teenth century they fulfilled a set of divergent roles, very different from
the colonial structure of the previous century and very different again from
those which they would assume within only another twenty years. Most
of them served functions that might or might not be enhanced by their
colonial relationship: whether as sources of cane sugar or dumping grounds
for convicts. For most of these areas, however, it would not have made any
crucial difference to the British economy if they had been outside British
government control.
The exception was India, where it would have made a very substantial
difference indeed even apart from the regulated plunder extracted by the
East India Company through the state powers conferred upon it – a major
component in City transactions. Following the secession of the North
American colonies ‘the empire became for the most part a system of rule
over non-European peoples. Its centre of gravity would be the Indian Ocean
rather than the Atlantic.’16 Without the enormous Indian export market,
protected in reality if not in form from foreign competition, Lancashire
cotton manufacture, the very pivot of industrialisation, would have been
effectively crippled. The destruction of the handicraft cotton manufactures
of Bengal, as the local market was flooded with machine-produced tex-
tiles, with consequent mass starvation,17 had been the precondition for
the final mechanisation and rapid growth of the Lancashire industry ear-
lier in the century. India’s subject status fulfilled an additional important
function: the subcontinent furnished the necessary base for the penetra-
tion of East Asian commerce, particularly the Chinese market. The com-
modity which in this case provided the cutting edge of commercial pen-
etration was opium – produced and exported from India and forced upon
the Chinese at gunpoint.
 Introduction 9

Capital Investment and Industrial Challenge

Overlapping although not wholly coinciding with the above development,

the City since 1815, capitalising on techniques evolved during the French
Wars, had begun to experiment with the export of capital, the practice of
foreign investment, through loans to foreign governments, investment in
canal construction in the USA or, tentatively, mining and agricultural en-
terprises. A lot of capital was thus sunk in the 1820s and 1830s, and (in
Eric Hobsbawm’s words) much of it was sunk without trace, but the experi-
ence provided valuable training for what was to come. By the date of the
Great Exhibition of 1851 Britain was unquestionably an industrial economy
and the 1850s and 1860s marked the era of its apparently unchallengable
ascendancy both industrially and commercially. Nevertheless, by the early
1870s the position was changing and the unchallengeable was about to be
challenged.

Second Industrial Revolution – the Global Economy

1870–1914

In the course of the 1870s a number of developments – in technology, raw

material inputs, trade and consumption patterns, agriculture, population
movements, price levels, capital flows – came together to produce what
economic historians often refer to as ‘the second industrial revolution’.
Technological innovation affected both existing technologies, and more
importantly, produced an entire new range. Steam engines and steel pro-
duction methods were revolutionised, as were certain textile manufactur-
ing processes. Industrial chemistry entered a new era. Even more signifi-
cant, however, was the emergence of new power sources in the form of the
petrol engine and electricity with its multitude of possible applications;
communications in a variety of dimensions from telephones and the sound
phonograph to the motor vehicle and cinematography. The new commodi-
ties and processes demanded on a hitherto unprecedented scale access to
a range of raw materials such as copper, rubber (essential both in tyres and
for insulating electrical cables and wires) and above all, as the years ad-
vanced, oil. In all the developed countries, but particularly the United States
and Germany (Britain was less affected, but did not escape the process)
there emerged on an unprecedented scale cartels and giant quasi-monopo-
lies controlling large sectors of production and the domestic market, and
in Germany a growing coalescence between banking and industrial capi-
tal. The global character of these developments was underlined by the
phenomenal leap which occurred in the export of capital, funds seeking
10 Global Expansion

profitable investment opportunities abroad from the economies of Brit-

ain, Germany and France.
The industrialisation of the United States was beginning to get into its
stride and its domestic market was starting to feel a decreasing need for
British capital goods, although it was to remain for many years a voracious
importer of British funds. In central Europe the establishment of the Ger-
man Reich created a direct competitor in world export markets,18 a formi-
dable trading rival whose industrial structure and technology was in many
respects ahead of the British.19 The arrival of intensified competition
throughout the world economy was signalled by the long-term price de-
flation and reduced growth rates labelled the ‘great Victorian depression’,
which in spite of its name, did not affect Britain only. The unity of the
world economy remained – was drawn tighter indeed – but at the same
time subjected to developing strains and tensions.

Unstable Structure

Simultaneously, the diplomatic process was initiated which over forty years
divided the major states of Europe between two hostile camps armed to
the teeth. Whether this was the cause or the consequence of commercial
and investment rivalries and competitive empire-building is not our im-
mediate concern – the argument is a complex one – but undeniably the
two processes were closely related and by the early twentieth century the
European states and their direct and indirect dependencies, together with
the United States, formed a complex and diversified but highly unstable
interlocking structure of wealth and power. Within this, the British imperi-
al system constituted the central element. Its formal empire was the big-
gest of any, its shipping dominated the commercial sea-lanes as its warfleet
did the strategic harbours and communications. It overshadowed all ri-
vals in the provision of commercial and financial services, its currency
served as the world standard of value, its overseas investments eclipsed
those of any competitor. These realities had profound implications for the
character of class relations, ideological perceptions and political interac-
tions within the British Isles themselves.

Lenin’s Interpretation20

By far the most influential interpretation of the global imperialist process

was, as noted in the preface, that sketched by Lenin in 1916, which attrib-
uted the development to a mutation within world capitalism. According
to this model, tendencies towards the replacement of open markets by
 Introduction 11

monopoly control, combined with greater profits to be earned from in-

vestment abroad, induced capital to mobilise the power of governments
to divide and redivide the world into exclusive zones of interest, often but
not invariably taking the shape of formal colonies. He summarised it as
follows:

Imperialism is capitalism in that stage of development in which the

domination of the monopolies and finance capital has established it-
self; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced impor-
tance; in which the division of the world among the international
trusts has begun; in which the partition of all the territories of the
globe among the great capitalist powers has been completed.21

In this manner, the outbreak of the European conflict in 1914 is also

explained as a general struggle for redivision of the territorial and eco-
nomic loot once there were no unclaimed portions remaining, and the
collapse of the established European labour movements into chauvinism
and ‘sacred union’ with their rulers on the commencement of the war was
accounted for by their leaders having been bribed out of imperial super-
profits.22
For over thirty years a sustained historiographical attack was deployed
against this thesis – its beginning coinciding, and probably not acciden-
tally, with when the rate of African decolonisation was gathering pace in
the early 1960s. The effect of this revision, whatever the intention (and
no-one need impugn the motives of the academics in question) would be
to acquit capitalism, whose future on the continent was then at stake, of
the crimes of imperialism, for which few by then had a good word – all of
which does not necessarily invalidate the rebuttal of Lenin’s thesis: the
evidence has to be considered on its merits, and the evidence, as suggested
above, is adverse to Lenin, at least in so far as tropical colonies are con-
cerned.
The present text will not address that debate in great detail, though a
full accounting for late nineteenth-century imperialism must certainly
engage with it and it is hoped that a subsequent volume will explore the
full range of theoretical issues with reference to such authors as, inter
alia Fieldhouse, Robinson and Gallagher, Offer, Platt, O’Brien, Cain and
Hopkins. Nonetheless, in this more modest project of identifying the
forces and processes which propelled the world’s most advanced indus-
trial nation, already possessed of a substantial empire, into participation
in a further climactic spasm of colony-seizure, an explanatory model is of
course unavoidable, both for the general course of imperialism during the
12 Global Expansion

last half-millennium and more specifically the form which it assumed from
around 1870.
The pre-industrial version of world supremacy had required colonies,
settlements and dependencies as subordinate producers and part of its
control mechanisms. Mid-nineteenth-century capital and its spokesper-
sons were inclined to wonder whether it could not dispense with the cost
of those it had inherited from the former era and rely altogether on the
invisible empire outlined above, with the British Navy placed discreetly
in the background.
It was bound to be a historically transient state of affairs (though I think
it might have lasted somewhat longer than it did) and before long capital
centred in other European states and in the USA, and obliged on pain of
perpetual subordination to try to copy the British achievement had suc-
ceeded in doing so. In certain respects, exploiting superior technology and
economies of scale, their industrialists before the end of the century sig-
nificantly surpassed their British counterparts, who nevertheless contin-
ued to dominate the global circuits. As these circuits expanded to hitherto
untouched areas and deepened in complexity, the German state, the most
successful of the new industrial powers, conceived hegemonic aims which
eventually brought it into direct conflict with its British predecessor. Even
before that point was reached, however, the repercussions of the German
geopolitical impact on Europe, together with the politically fragmented
and ‘primitive’ character of the new areas to which capital was extending
its reach, had occasioned the addition between 1880 and 1900 of an ex-
tended territorial empire to the invisible one already noted.
Thus was born the new imperialism. My argument will be that the overt
acquisition of new dependencies in the late nineteenth century represented
only a part, and not necessarily even the most significant part, of that re-
ality. By 1914 virtually all the territorial disputes which these scrambles gen-
erated had been settled diplomatically, but the military blocs formed
around the two rival claimants to global hegemony nevertheless clashed
in an annihilating conflict which thoroughly destabilised and partially
destroyed the structures of both the world economy and international state
system. To look for a moment beyond the limits of our study, British capi-
tal found the fruits of its apparent triumph in 1918 exceedingly sour ones,
and it was clear that by then an even more threatening rival to its hege-
mony, such as it was, over the crippled world trade system had appeared
in the shape of the USA. The general economic breakdown, however, post-
poned for twenty years realisation of the US potential, while German capi-
tal, organised by a terrorist and psychopathic regime, tried once more
between 1938 and 1945 to assert world supremacy. The outcome of that
 Introduction 13

conflict left the City in unquestionable if reluctant subordination to the

dollar and the USA exercising, except over the communist bloc, the same
kind of financial authority that Britain had done half a century before-
hand.

Scope of Discussion

Chapter 1 considers the antecedents of the concept of imperialism and

the background of developments in the British Isles which turned England/
Britain into the most successful of commercial imperialist states by the
eighteenth century and the hub of a world exchange system, and reviews
the position reached by the middle of the nineteenth century and the
colonial empire acquired up to that point, while Chapter 2 examines in
more detail the character and structural importance of these colonies on
the eve of the great expansion, together with the internal forces in British
politics and society reformulating and promoting the imperial idea.
Chapters 3 to 5 cover the course of colonial acquisition, examine how
the imperial system worked in practice from the point of view of both
colonisers and colonised, and discuss the impact of these events on social
relations in Britain, high and popular culture and the shape imposed upon
the country’s political evolution. External political relations are discussed
in terms of goals and motives impelling the diplomatic manoeuvres and
eventual military clash of rival empires. Chapter 6 makes an attempt to
sum up and evaluate the significance for the British people, and particu-
larly of the labour movement, of this imperialist phase and indicate its
long-term historical legacy down to the present.

Further Reading
Perry Anderson, ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, New Left Review 23, Jan/Feb 1964. A
classic overview of British capitalism from the revolution of the seventeenth
century onwards.
Emannuel Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, Verso, 1994. Covers an even lengthier
span. Demanding, but very rewarding.
Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe, Penguin, 1993. Medieval colonialism.
Ben Brewer, Marxist Theories of Imperialism, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980.
Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975. Deals with
early-modern colonial expansion in the British Isles.
E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital 1848–1875, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975. Classic
overview of world history during these years.
E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875–1914, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987. Cov-
ers both the growth of empires and the forces which motivated it.
Tom Kemp, Industrialisation in Nineteenth-century Europe, Longman, 1969.
14 Global Expansion

Tom Kemp, Theories of Imperialism, Dennis Dobson, 1967. Marxist theories from a
Trotskyist perspective.
V.G. Kiernan, Marxism and Imperialism, Edward Arnold, 1974. A set of scintillating
essays.
V.I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1916 (Collected Works, vol.
22, Lawrence & Wishart, 1964). The classic Marxist interpretation.
R. Owen and B. Sutcliffe, Studies in the Theory of Imperialism, Longman, 1972. A
very wide-ranging discussion.
1
The British Empire on the Eve

The British empire, acquired in stages since the seventeenth century, had
by 1870 already reached a size both in area and population greater than
any of its rivals were to attain by 1914. The oldest components consisted
of Bermuda and a large number of West Indian islands, of which Jamaica
was the biggest, though not as large as the South American mainland
colony, British Guiana. These represented an important but far from cen-
tral element in the imperial structure.
The settlement colonies, whose name indicates their essential charac-
ter, were Canada, Australia (until 1900 seven separate colonies) and New
Zealand, to which should be added the South African possessions of Cape
Colony and Natal, different from the others because British-descended
settlers could never hope to form a majority of their population. The ‘jewel
in the crown’ was of course India, with its enormous wealth, indigenous
population and high civilisation, conquered piece by piece since the 1750s.
The conquest of Ceylon to the south and Burma to the east had reflected
the same process on a lesser scale.
The remainder of the empire, though amounting to a considerable popu-
lation overall, represented only dots and patches upon the map – such as the
Central American colony of British Honduras, Gibraltar, Malta, Heligoland,
the Ionian Islands, the Gambia, a strip of the later Sierra Leone, several
forts on the West African Gold Coast, a scattering of South Atlantic islands,
footholds on the coast of the Malay peninsula and East Indies, and Hong
Kong, forcibly leased from the Chinese authorities.
These constituted the formal empire. The ‘informal empire’ over which
the British state and/or capital exercised a greater or lesser hegemony in-
cluded the republics of South America and the decaying empires of the
Turkish and Persian sovereigns.

15
16 Global Expansion

The Background

British global policy in the mid-nineteenth century has been termed ‘the
imperialism of free trade’,1 and the designation contains a great mea-
sure of truth. Even before free trade was a fully-fledged reality, Marx ob-
served percipiently in the Communist Manifesto: ‘The cheap prices of [the
bourgeoisie’s] commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters
down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely
obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate.’ 2 Around that point in time
a regime of global accumulation still basically agricultural and under-
pinned by natural power sources – wind, water and above all human
muscle – was in transition to one dependent upon the artificial power
of steam, which was technologically developed and industrial in the
modern sense of the term. Uniquely in these transitions, the same soci-
ety and state which had presided over the previous form, which had
reached its apogee in the late eighteenth century, was also the centre of
the new one.
The British economy depended upon global markets and it was export-
dependent to an extraordinary degree. British industrial products domi-
nated the circuits of global exchange; the Great Exhibition of 1851 was a
demonstration and celebration of that ascendancy – and yet was only a
foretaste of what was to follow in the next two decades. Free trade was the
instrument through which these markets were protected and expanded.
In form free trade, as expounded by its partisans such as Richard Cobden,
represented a regime of equality founded upon the doctrine of compara-
tive cost advantage – every part of the world complex of production and
exchange would produce whatever it was best fitted to, and thereby estab-
lish its superiority in that particular line of production. Free trade would
act as the invisible hand deterring countries or regions from trying to enter
inappropriate lines; it would compel them to maximise their natural ad-
vantages and make every part of the world mutually dependent – generat-
ing international concord and amity as welcome by-products.
The reality, it need hardly be stressed, was very different. The doctrine
of comparative advantage assumed static conditions, it took no account of
development over time and the conditions it assumed were those of the
mid-nineteenth century, in which Britain (by following an earlier policy
of protectionism) had got the edge, and in most cases much more than the
edge, over every other country in industrial production. By the early 1850s
the UK was effectively (ignoring points of detail) the sole industrialised
country in a non-industrialised world, which gave it command over glo-
bal markets both as an exporter and importer. Free trade, in other words,
 The British Empire on the Eve 17

was the ideological sanctification for British industrial, commercial and

financial ascendancy.

The Global Economy and the Empire

In the two decades following 1850 the relationship of Britain to its trading
partners, and particularly to its formal and informal dependencies, was
transformed. The agent of transformation was the railway and in two di-
mensions its consequences were momentous. The development of this
transport system, combined with steam ocean navigation, which doubled
its efficiency in the 1850s,3 not to speak of the telegraph, abolished dis-
tance and inaccessibility, brought within reach of the market bulk min-
eral and agricultural commodities on a hitherto unimaginable scale – US
wheat, Chilean copper, Australian wool, eventually Argentinian beef and
New Zealand mutton, to mention only some particularly notable examples.
The other principal feature of worldwide railway construction was the
scope which it provided for large-scale investment in foreign parts – a form
of enterprise which, through this medium, British capital now started to
address in a serious fashion – exporting not only the funds but often the
rails, equipment, rolling stock and labour force as well.4 Further invest-
ment could then follow to develop the mines, ranches or plantations which
the railway made viable. In the later nineteenth century the railway was
the key to political and economic success in the settlement colonies. At
the time a colonial or subordinate relationship on the part of the recipient
was hardly needed to facilitate the process, as nobody else was exporting
railways. Lending by British investors to foreign governments also resumed
on a large scale during these two decades.
In short, what had been for over a century a global economy in terms of
trade networks, became an enormously more tightly articulated and pro-
ductive one. While this was happening in the course of the 1850s and 1860s
there was little extension of formal colonies on the part of any European
power.5 Thanks to new technologies and opportunities, however, fresh
potential could be perceived and developed in ones which had been ap-
propriated by European states for a variety of purposes in an earlier eco-
nomic era, while the ongoing penetration of weaker and technically less
developed extra-European economies eroded the latters’ stability and au-
tonomy. Dominating the entire structure were British production, British
commerce and British financial services, and, it might be added, British
economic ideology, as free markets and free trade came to be perceived as
the wave of the future by enlightened opinion throughout the ‘civilised’
world.6
18 Global Expansion

Not surprisingly in such circumstances the continuing need for colo-

nies was called into question; the existing ones appeared to add little to
such already overwhelming dominance. What the participants had in mind
during such discussions was in the main what would be called the settle-
ment colonies, with the envisaged model being the United States. James
Stephen, the civil servant who dominated British colonial administration
from the 1820s to 1847, regarded their existence as a misfortune for Brit-
ain which had to be patiently borne until the settlers decided for them-
selves to end the connection. There did exist in the 1830s and 1840s a
group of upper-middle-class publicists who proposed a diametrically op-
posite view and in some measure prefigured the notions of Joseph Cham-
berlain at the end of the century: they advocated a doctrine of ‘systematic
colonisation’ and settlement of the colonies as one component of an au-
thoritarian social programme also embracing Britain. Their leading spokes-
person was Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who founded the National Coloni-
sation Society (and was ridiculed by Marx in an appendix to the first
volume of Capital).
The most important of all the imperial possessions was not really thought
of as a colony. India was a conglomeration of territories ruled formally or
informally by a commercial enterprise, the East India Company, though
that had demitted its commercial functions in 1833 to concentrate upon
raising revenue from taxation. The subcontinent was of the utmost com-
mercial importance to Britain and British policy was consistently aggres-
sive – politically, territorially and culturally. In the words of General Sir
Charles Napier, conqueror of Sind, and intimidator of Chartists:

Would I were king of India! I would make Moscowa and Pekin shake ...
England’s fleet should be all in the west and the Indian army all in the
east. India ... should suck English manufactures up her great rivers, and
pour down those rivers her own varied products.7

Which certainly has the virtue of expressing concisely the relationship

between geopolitics, military power and commercial aspiration. In the
more sober terminology two present-day historians:

From the 1850s India became a notable outpost of the new service and
financial order which had come to prominence in Britain following
the demise of Old Corruption and sterling’s role as a world currency.
The main instruments of British policy in India, the army and civil ser-
vice employed only a small number of white officials. But they had their
hands on the levers of power: they controlled the means of coercion,
 The British Empire on the Eve 19

they collected and allocated India’s vast revenues, and their values
helped to shape policy and its execution ... the Indian army remained
vital to Britain’s presence in Asia, both for reasons of internal security
and for policing the vast region stretching from the Eastern Mediterra-
nean to China. Without the Indian Army and the Indian revenues that
sustained it, Britain would not have been able to maintain her position
east of Suez, and her status as a great power would have been seriously
impaired.8

From time to time the Company and government authorities in Lon-

don would object to the annexationist activities of their proconsuls in
India (usually on grounds of cost) but always ended up endorsing them.
This too set a precedent for what was to occur several decades later in
tropical Africa.
Free trade, whatever its theoretical aspirations, was in the real world,
and not only in India, far from being a harbinger of peace and co-opera-
tion. In relation to countries recognised as forming part of the concert of
nations and disposing of significant military forces the missionaries of free
trade had to proceed by negotiation and diplomacy. Elsewhere, however,
if the barbarians were so retarded as to stay unimpressed by the cheapness
of British commodities, punitive force, with or without subsequent annex-
ation, was always at hand to bring them to their senses.
So it was employed against the Burmese kings, commencing in 1824 and
continuing until 1852, with their territory annexed to the Indian empire,
but the most dramatic instance of this aspect of the imperialism of free
trade was seen in the wars waged against the Chinese Empire from the late
1830s to the late 1850s. These conflicts had a variety of pretexts but the
essential purpose was in every case the same – to compel the Chinese au-
thorities to reverse their attempts to regulate trading relations in the Chi-
nese ports and instead permit into the Celestial empire the import of opium
cultivated in British India – for this drug was the mainstay of the far east-
ern trade and without it the British merchant houses had no commodity
which was in great demand in the Chinese market, while the abolition in
1833 of the East India Company’s monopoly of trade with China sharp-
ened their appetites. Following the first of the Opium Wars in 1839 the
territory of Hong Kong was secured to make the trade easier to conduct,
though in deference to China’s nominal recognition as a state it was ‘leased’
rather than annexed outright.
In this manner China began its career as the most striking instance of a
development originating in the first half of the century, pioneered in Lon-
don, and destined to a long and discreditable career – the informal or semi-
20 Global Expansion

colony, in which ostensibly sovereign states were induced by diplomatic

pressure or, as in the Chinese case, armed coercion to modify their exter-
nal trade relations so as to give British commercial entrepreneurs a free
hand, enabling them to convert these polities into economic colonies and
even to determine the direction of their productive activity. Along with
China9 such a fate had also overtaken the politically decaying, feudally
structured Ottoman empire and the weak successor states to the Spanish
empire in South America, particularly its southern cone.

British Society

The third quarter of the nineteenth century formed a watershed not only
in the economic history of the UK but in its social and political relations
as well. In general terms it represented a recrystallisation of social and
class structures after the tectonic shifts and eruptions of the Industrial
Revolution. The manual workforce, whether or not employed in tech-
nologically advanced industry, adapted to the reality and permanence of
industrial society or sought better prospects overseas. As Edward Thomp-
son put it, they ‘proceeded to warren it from end to end ... the character-
istic class institutions of the Labour Movement were built up – trade
unions, trades councils, TUC, co-ops and the rest – which have endured
to this day’.10
The propertied (except for occasional brief panics) no longer lived in
fear of the mob. The revolution in Paris on February 1848 had profoundly
alarmed the authorities in London, in real fear of a British imitation; the
Paris Commune of 1871 (much though British elites deplored it) did not.
These years saw a consolidation of the social structures formed in the matrix
of the previous six decades and the emergence of many other institutions
– from universities and the banking system to sports clubs – in the form
which in essence they retain to this day. The propertied class had changed
in composition and character, so had the ranks of the propertyless, and
compared with the turmoils of the first half of the century general stabil-
ity marked the structure which had evolved.
In certain respects there was melioration. Both the agricultural and in-
dustrial economies stabilised. In spite of occasional tremors there was to
be in the 1850s to 1870s nothing like the roller-coaster experience of boom
and slump of the earlier decades or the chronic recession which set in after
1873. Albeit marginally and slowly, real incomes improved, as did general
standards of diet. The first moves were initiated towards effective urban
sanitation and lighting, pure water supply, public health. What would
become known in later times as the ‘trickle-down’ theory of allocation
 The British Empire on the Eve 21

appeared to work marvellously and free trade concepts appeared to be

eminently justified.
Political change followed. The struggle by the propertyless in the form
of the Chartist movement to break directly into the electoral arena had
been decisively repulsed, but the pressure for a widened franchise contin-
ued in a lower key through a variety of ad hoc associations. In 1867 a com-
bination of these pressures with political opportunism on the part of the
Conservative parliamentary leadership produced the Second Reform Act,
instituting an approximation to a household franchise in the urban areas.
The expansion of the electorate thus produced had considerable implica-
tions for political management.
Belligerent xenophobia and conviction of national superiority had been
for more than two centuries a central component of English popular cul-
ture, generated firstly by the internal colonialism of the early modern era
in relation to Scotland and Ireland, and more importantly by the century-
long cycle of trade wars with France, of which the final episode, ending in
1815, had also been a counter-revolutionary war. It was this feature of the
national psyche that Lord Palmerston had been so adept at playing upon
during the middle years of the century to mobilise popular support for
aggressions committed under the banner of free trade. It was reinforced
(with comparable developments in Scotland) by the influx of Irish immi-
gration from the 1840s onward. As circumstances changed after the early
1870s this sense of national superiority was ready and waiting for exploi-
tation by demagogues, politicians, journalists and the would-be empire-
builders who then made their entrance upon the historical stage.

Prelude

In the second half of the nineteenth century a substantial flow of volun-

tary emigrants left Britain for permanent settlement overseas.11 The most
common destination, it is true, was the United States, but considerable
numbers also ended up in Canada and Australia, while South Africa and
New Zealand, though less popular, attracted enough to fix these areas of
settlement as part of a global network of English-speaking communities.
The process resulted in the cases of Canada and Australia in the margi-
nalisation or near extermination of the indigenous population – through
massacre, disease, alcoholism, depressed birth rates – and in South Africa
and New Zealand to its dispossession and complete subordination.
What these colonies had in common, the feature which provided the
attraction for immigrants, was that for the most part they lay within the
temperate zones of the northern or southern hemispheres, and therefore
22 Global Expansion

possessed, once the obstacle of their original inhabitants was removed,

great potential for variants of British agricultural practice,12 and, with cheap
land and economies of scale, the potential for exploiting British consumer
demand. However, it was a potential only realisable for the most part by
means of steam-driven transport systems and, ultimately, refrigeration and
therefore it was not until the 1870s that the settlement colonies began to
develop as part of a coherent producing, trading and financial complex
centred on the UK. To simplify somewhat, the role that these territories
fulfilled was essentially that of agricultural extensions to the British economy,
significantly reducing the prices of certain raw materials, particularly wool
and, slightly later, foodstuffs, upon the British market, a feature that had
implications for class relations and social stability within the UK, for it
meant that the masses could enjoy rising standards of consumption with-
out too seriously depressing British profit margins as a result. Within their
own boundaries these colonies erected superstructures of transport, con-
struction, service industries, administration and land speculation upon
the agricultural foundation.
All of these developments as they accelerated in the last third of the
century – agricultural development, ongoing railway and harbour con-
struction, building, civil engineering, mining where it occurred, and the
service activities – required funding and thereby, since they mostly en-
joyed social and political conditions which minimised risk, provided at-
tractive opportunities for British investors. Faced with large debt repay-
ments, while waiting for the returns on the investments to come on stream,
the settlement colonies frequently experienced adverse balance of pay-
ments vis-à-vis the UK, requiring further lending to plug the gap. The City
and the circles of finance capital provided much but by no means all of
the funding. The savings of the lower middle classes were tapped as well
through the mechanism of the investment trust, institutions which relieved
the individual investor of having to make particular decisions about where
to invest and which guaranteed (or purported to do so) to bring in the best
and safest returns with the funds entrusted to them. They reached a far
wider public than the stock exchange, both socially and geographically: a
major centre was in fact the city of Dundee.
The settlement colonies were thus tightly bound into an economic sys-
tem centred on the UK market and controlled by its financial apparatus.
They were no less tightly integrated into a seaborne military structure
equipped for defensive or offensive action on behalf of British interests
anywhere in the world. The colonies’ white male inhabitants neverthe-
less enjoyed a good deal of local political autonomy which it was thought
safe and expedient to concede on account of the transplanted British com-
 The British Empire on the Eve 23

mercial and cultural values with which they operated.13 Each of these colo-
nies possessed an elected assembly which, under the supervision of a Brit-
ish-appointed governor, handled internal colonial affairs, particularly the
procedures for land allocation.
In Australasia, especially, land was cheap while skilled labour was scarce
and expensive. Consequently, the political profile, not to mention the
earnings, of the white manual workforce were raised above those of their
counterparts anywhere in the contemporaneous world; labour parties
developed and commitments to measures of social welfare were placed on
the political agenda a decade and more before similar developments in
the UK. A more sinister aspect of the process, however, was the determina-
tion of the British-descended labour force to protect its favoured position
in the labour market by excluding on racist criteria the immigration of
potentially cheaper labour from Asia – an attitude and practice embodied
in the ‘White Australia’ policy.
In South Africa wholly different circumstances existed due to the poten-
tial availability of a black helot reservoir of unskilled labour and the shift
in the balance of the region’s economy from agriculture to diamonds and
gold. Even so, commencing from a different starting point the outcome
was in certain respects a similar one and attitudes of racial exclusiveness
among white skilled workers, coupled with a rhetoric of social radicalism,
emerged, particularly within the mining industry.
The settlement colonies then, quite apart from the later central impor-
tance of South African gold, served as important elements in the British
global economic network as suppliers of foodstuffs and raw materials, as
markets for British industrial products, as outlets for emigration and as
absorbers of capital; but it has to be noted that in all these respects they
were eclipsed by a politically independent entity, namely the United States.
The USA was not, like the settlement colonies, merely a supplementary
supplier of foodstuffs to British consumers: by the late 1980s its grain ex-
ports had ruined English arable farming. It took more exports and more
immigrants than any other part of the world. The expansion of its popula-
tion and the pace of its agricultural and industrial growth made it a vora-
cious consumer of capital and although most of that country’s investment
was domestically generated there was plenty of scope for the City and the
investment trusts as well.14 In short, from a purely economic point of view
the United States during the late nineteenth century fulfiled the same role
as the settlement colonies, only more so. The main difference from the
British point of view was that it did not provide administrative posts or
sinecures for the British ruling class and did not constitute part of its glo-
bal military network.
24 Global Expansion

India

The position of India was unique. Its role as the base for far eastern trade
has been noted, and it grew the opium which initially prised open that
market. As an absorber of exports and capital it was overshadowed only
by the United States; as a generator of revenues it had no equal. It produced
cotton, sugar cane, indigo and jute among other critically important Brit-
ish imports. The taxes exacted by the Indian government – exacted for the
most part ultimately from subsistence peasant farmers and resulting in
growing levels of famine in the course of the nineteenth century – sus-
tained the remittances on government borrowing and the parasitic bu-
reaucracy through which the subcontinent was administered, up to 1858
by the East India Company and thereafter directly by the British crown.15
It also sustained the Indian army, which represented the largest land force
available to the British state and was critically important not only for in-
ternal policing and tax collection but served as the mainstay, alongside
the navy, of British power from China to the Middle East. More than any
other part of the empire, India had been and remained fundamental to the
concerns of the British ruling class. Lord Salisbury referred to it as ‘an
English barrack in the Oriental Seas’.16
The Caribbean islands, small in geographical extent, had been a central
component of the eighteenth-century empire as the source of the immen-
sely valuable cane sugar crop – and important too for the rum distilled from
it. In the nineteenth century, if less crucial to the structure of trade as colo-
nial re-exports from Britain to its overseas markets were superseded by manu-
factures, the islands, together with the colony of British Guiana on the South
American mainland, nevertheless remained significant as producers of that
commodity, whose centrality to British social life can scarcely be over-
rated and which constituted an important energy source for the labouring
population. Since the 1830s the plantations had ceased to be cultivated by
slave labour but were instead tended by the descendants of the slave popu-
lation as a propertyless free labour force which could be expanded or con-
tracted according to the labour demands of the cycle of cane cultivation.17
On top of this basic class division rested a complex hierarchy of status
differentials associated with degree of skin pigmentation. In 1864 social
protest in the oldest Caribbean colony, Jamaica, had escalated into an in-
surrection, suppressed with relentless ferocity by the authorities and the
British military, the suppression being applauded by many of the great and
the good within the British Establishment.18
At the beginning of the 1870s the only large British possession in Africa
was the agricultural settlement colony and key to the Pacific sea-route at
 The British Empire on the Eve 25

the Cape, but certain other bridgeheads did exist. These were located along
the coastline west of the Niger and had their origin from the earlier de-
cades of the century as bases for naval action to suppress the West African
slave trade following the abandonment by the British of this form of com-
merce and its outlawing by international agreement. The Liverpool slav-
ing firms had meantime switched their activities into ‘legitimate com-
merce’ and found a commodity on which to reconstitute their fortunes,
the vegetable oil produced in the Niger delta, which they purchased
through the same local rulers that had formerly been their suppliers of
slaves, and in this they managed perfectly adequately without any need
for an imperial presence. Indeed, by the 1860s the West African outposts
were regarded in government circles as of such negligible importance that
it was seriously proposed to abandon them.

The 1870s

The 1870s marked a turning point in a number of dimensions for Britain,

Europe and the wider world. Economically, steam transport enhanced the
flexibility of the global market and technological growth brought new
industrial economies onto the scene, resulting in long-term deflation of
prices and profits, more stringent competition and rising tariff barriers.
Socially and politically, labour movements in a number of European coun-
tries constituted organisations and parties which began to assert demands
for political power or even threaten revolution. Diplomatically and mili-
tarily, the processes got underway which culminated in the division of
Europe into two antagonistic armed blocs.
So far as Britain was concerned, a spatter of still relatively minor colo-
nial wars and expansions occurred on the frontiers of its existing empire,
principally in Africa. More important was the creation of a sentiment, a
reorientation of public attitudes towards openly imperialistic ambitions,
an acceptance and expectation which penetrated deep into British soci-
ety, that the empire was worth preserving, consolidating and expanding.
A precursor of what was to come was the two-volume text Greater Britain
(the title is eloquent enough) published by the rising Liberal politician Sir
Charles Dilke. Containing phrases such as ‘America, Australia, India, must
form a Greater Britain’ and ‘the difficulties which impede the progress to
universal dominion of the English people lie in the conflict with the
cheaper races’, the book made a considerable impact. The date was 1868.
The ideological foundations were being laid for the annexations and
colony-seizure that was to follow, with Africa as the principal theatre. In
1872 the British agent Sir Bartle Frere coerced the Arab Sultan of Zanzibar,
26 Global Expansion

ruler of a trading empire that had in 1832 shifted its base from the Oman
and the nominal overlord of wide domains in East Africa, into putting his
signature to a treaty that ostensibly prohibited slave trading within his
territories. The question of that commerce and the difficulty of extirpating
it by diplomatic or informal means was to be made into a favourite piece
of rhetoric employed by the interests promoting commercial penetration
and territorial takeover in that part of the continent. The same Frere gave
a public speech in Glasgow three years later during which he outlined a
scheme for the complete carving up of Africa among the European pow-
ers, not greatly unlike the one which was to take place in reality over the
next quarter-century. Certainly in this he was a long way ahead of other
publicists or politicians of the time – the Glasgow newspapers the follow-
ing day almost unanimously ridiculed Frere’s perspectives. Appointed
Governor of Cape Colony and British High Commissioner in South Af-
rica in 1877 he antagonised the Boers and provoked wars with the Xhosa
and Zulus in pursuit of an endeavour to unite South Africa under British
control. Clearly he was a portent of things to come.
Simultaneously, explorers, financed by geographical or religious societ-
ies, recounted their adventures in the British media, their eyes dazzled by
spectacular natural phenomena, their mouths full of tales of untold wealth
and commercial potential – not to mention millions of souls waiting to be
gathered to Christ. David Livingstone, whose renown spread among the
public in the early 1870s, was one such, undoubtedly replete with good
intentions; the figure with whom his name is inseparably linked, the odi-
ous H. M. Stanley, had the commercial potential of his exploratory activi-
ties more firmly in view. The 1870s saw a quickening of commercial activ-
ity in Africa as elsewhere throughout the empire, but it must be emphasised
that in that decade Africa, so far as British capital, government and public
were concerned, remained as yet a relatively peripheral matter.

Political Forces

The swelling notes of the imperial theme beginning to sound in late Vic-
torian Britain and soon to overwhelm every other political melody, were,
for all Bartle Frere’s percipience, orchestrated at this stage of development
not so much in counting houses or stock exchanges, or for that matter in
Whitehall offices, as in constituency associations and elite political clubs.
A lot of significance is usually attached to the Crystal Palace speech made
by the Conservative leader Disraeli in 1872, and its importance was cer-
tainly far-reaching. It was not, however, a call for the extension of imperi-
al boundaries, but for a strengthened appreciation of the then existing
 The British Empire on the Eve 27

empire as a unitary reality of world-historic significance presided over by

the British crown and bathing the meanest voter of the country’s elector-
ate in its reflected glory.
It was in short a public relations or propagandist tactic. The Second Re-
form Act of 1867 and the Ballot Act of 1872 had created an enlarged elec-
torate, embracing the more skilled and prosperous sections of the manual
workforce, out of reach of traditional forms of electoral manipulation and
influence. The bloc of wealth, privilege and political ascendancy with its
foundations in landownership was menaced economically by shifts in
world trade patterns and increasing agricultural competition and politi-
cally by the new constitutional structures. Even since 1832 it had faced a
growing necessity, through its political embodiment, the Tory Party, to
master the arts of mass politics, and in this it had been only indifferently
successful. Following 1867 the need had become doubly urgent: the Lib-
eral Party in 1868 decisively won the first election fought on the enlarged
franchise and seemed likely to retain permanently the loyalty of the new
electorate, threatening with permanent subordination a Conservative
interest which up to that point had won outright only one election in
twenty years.
To be sure, the rival Liberal bloc did not threaten the institutions of prop-
erty or hierarchy in any dramatic fashion,19 also it possessed its own very
powerful landowning component and its own authoritarian religiosity.
Nonetheless, if the Conservative Party was to survive as a major political
actor it was compelled to effect a social mobilisation at a popular level such
as it had never previously accomplished. Imperial rhetoric – though the
outcome could not have been initially foreseen – proved to be the master
key that unlocked countless doors.
Fighting for his party’s life, Disraeli combined into a coherent ideologi-
cal attack three of what would nowadays be termed ‘discourses’. One form
of appeal was straightforward and material: the Conservative Party was
presented as the traditional if paternalist friend of the working man and
the other victims of market society, the agent of paternalist noblesse oblige
social reform in contrast to the heartless laissez-faire principles of Liberal
nonconformism. A practical outcome was the deliberate courting of the
trade union vote with a far more accommodating attitude to these orga-
nisations than Gladstone’s administration had ever displayed.20 Secondly
and connectedly, an anti-puritanical nostalgia was invoked, with Conser-
vatives portrayed as the hearty aristocratic defenders of popular lifestyles
and pleasures that the nonconformist conscience which dominated the
Liberal Party wanted to restrict or abolish – above all alcohol. The first of
these three, though it may have helped the Conservatives to win the 1874
28 Global Expansion

general election, had little impact in the long run. The second was a lot
more potent and contributed significantly to the establishment of a bed-
rock of Conservative influence among the working population.
It was the third, however, which returned incomparable dividends. By
channelling traditions of patriotic superiority with the distinct racist over-
tones lurking in the public consciousness, and combining them with the
posture of aggressive truculence towards foreigners, especially ‘uncivilised’
ones, upon which earlier in the century Palmerston had founded his ca-
reer, the ‘imperial turn’ inaugurated by Disraeli tapped into reserves of self-
congratulatory sentiment transcending class boundaries and antagonistic
class interests. It became increasingly as time went on the glue holding
together the socially divergent Conservative bloc. The public school gradu-
ate seeking a vocation consistent with his background and training, the
impoverished but aspiring white-collar clerk, the socially deferential
workingman, could all worship at the shrine of the red-splashed world
wall-map and feel themselves participants, whether leading or humble
ones, in a mighty national destiny. It was not long before academic histo-
rians, and following them routine publicists and authors of school text-
books21 were portraying the British empire as the providential culmina-
tion of superior moral and political virtue inherent in the Anglo-Saxon
race, exhibited in a continuous line of development since the days of Alfred
the Great.
If empire bound together a cross-class coalition it did no less for the
economically and ideologically threatened central component of that bloc.
If, with the irruption of mass politics, the hold of ancient elites on the British
state itself was slipping, all the more could they find consolation in pos-
turing as the high-profile rulers of a world-embracing empire. It was a
departure moreover which lent itself naturally to the politics of spectacle,
manufactured tradition and the ceremonial of power. A year after return-
ing to office in 1874 Disraeli conferred upon Queen Victoria the title of
Empress of India – a move which is said to have delighted the sovereign as
much as it doubtless inspired feelings of pride and reverence in the Tory
electorate. It was at the same time that the republican movement which
had existed in England for several decades, sometimes attracting high-level
adherents, was finally extinguished and the monarchy as an institution
elevated into sacrosanct immunity from respectable public criticism.22
The latter development symbolised a still more profound shift in con-
sciousness. The values associated with the ‘New Imperialism’, though a
deliberate partisan construct of the Conservative Party in the early years
of the 1870s, had caught a historic tide which made them in a remarkably
short period the dominant values of society at large. Henceforth, the Lib-
 The British Empire on the Eve 29

erals were in a dilemma they could never resolve. Compelled by the pre-
vailing ideological winds to adopt the same values on their own account
but unable wholeheartedly to do so, in relation to imperial issues they were
perpetually on the defensive: it was the Conservatives who were enabled
thereafter to wrap themselves in the imperial flag and present themselves
as the most resolute defenders of all that was associated with it.
By the end of the 1870s Gladstone was in power again and, it must once
more be stressed, the additions to imperial territory which had occurred
in that decade were minimal still. Nonetheless, a process had been set in
motion and acquired a historic momentum that would not be diverted by
anything so minor as a change in government. The state was on the point
of being driven irresistibly into the acquisition of a ‘Third Empire’.

Further Reading
Paul Adelman, Gladstone, Disraeli and Later Victorian Politics, Longman, 1970. The
political background.
P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion 1688–
1914, Longman, 1993. Exhaustive description and analysis, interpreting the
growth of empire as being driven by ‘gentlemanly capitalism’.
David Cannadine, ‘The Empire Strikes Back’, Past & Present 147, May 1995. Cri-
tique of Cain and Hopkins.
C.C. Eldridge, Victorian Imperialism, Hodder & Stoughton, 1978.
John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, Economic
History Review 6, 1953. A seminal interpretation.
Freda Harcourt, ‘Disraeli’s Imperialism, 1866–1868: A Question of Timing’, His-
torical Journal 23, 1980. Considers political motives.
Peter Mathias, The First Industrial Nation, Methuen, 1969. Wide-ranging and read-
able study of British economic development from the Industrial Revolution to
1914.
Andrew Porter, European Imperialism 1870–1914, Macmillan, 1994. Concise and
very informative.
A.N. Porter, An Atlas of British Overseas Expansion, Routledge, 1991. Supplies the
visual aids.
A.J. Stockwell (ed.), Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire, Cambridge
University Press, 1996. Informative and analytical. Not to be mistaken for a
coffee-table publication.
2
The Drive into Africa

The image of late nineteenth-century imperialism, both British and Euro-

pean generally, is associated inseparably with the African continent. Un-
til the 1870s this great landmass had featured in the calculations of Euro-
pean business or European chancelleries only in particular aspects and at
very specific individual points – although, certainly, some of these par-
ticularities were very important ones.
Geographic and climatic features were partly responsible for the gen-
eral indifference – neither desert nor rainforest attracted a numerous Eu-
ropean presence. More important, however, was the fact that these fea-
tures, combined with distance, geographic obstacles and the existing forms
of economic activity practised by African populations provided, once the
slave trade was outlawed, only limited scope for drawing off an economic
surplus whether by coercion or exchange, and one not likely to repay the
costs of bases and transport in the interior of the continent. Were large-
scale commercial penetration to take place the most likely route for it to
follow was via Africa’s three principal rivers, the Nile, the Niger and the
Congo, but of these only the first was fully navigable, and that only at certain
seasons.
The North African coast with its immediate hinterland formed a dis-
tinctive space set apart from the remainder of the continent. Long before
the concept of Europe had been thought of it was part of an integrated
Mediterranean economy and culture. The Islamic Arab invasions of the
seventh century turned a highway into a frontier and ruptured the Medi-
terranean unity. Subsequently, the Arab empire centred in Baghdad had
been superseded by a Turkish one ruled from Constantinople. By the early
nineteenth century, with the political decay of this regime far advanced,
the governors of its North African provinces were maintaining only a
formal allegiance and behaving with perfect autonomy.1 A major gap had

30
 The Drive into Africa 31

also appeared in the empire’s North African integrity, for one of these prov-
inces, namely Algeria, had been seized by the French state in 1830 as an
agricultural colony. In 1870 this was, apart from the British- and Dutch-
descended polities in the far south, the only considerable European pres-
ence in the whole continent.
That latter presence, however, represented only part of the lively inter-
est which Great Britain, as an imperial and world-dominant commercial
power held in certain parts of the African coastline – one of the particu-
larities referred to above. The security of communications both with its
Indian empire, its Australasian colonies and the Far East generally were
matters of critical importance. The colony at the Cape, whatever additional
purposes it might serve, was primarily important because it controlled the
long sea-route to the Indian Ocean. The short route, part of which was
necessarily overland, ran through the middle eastern territories of the
Turkish empire; consequently the stability, continuance and subservience
of that state had become cardinal principles of British strategy and diplo-
macy. As Hobsbawm puts it: ‘To preserve as much as possible of its privi-
leged access to the non-European world was a matter of life and death for
the British economy.’2 The point was that this world was, during the last
quarter of the century, undergoing the process of increasing European
penetration.

Egypt

In 1869 the short land-route became a sea-route as well with the inaugu-
ration in that year of the Suez Canal, making Egypt an even more central
concern than it already was. In 1870, 486 ships passed through it. Their
total capacity was 436,000 tons, and 66 per cent of that was British. By 1910
the total tonnage amounted to 16.5 million, with 63 per cent of that being
British. The canal had in fact been constructed with French capital, but,
open to the shipping of all nations in the free-trade era that the world was
assumed to be moving into, that was not seen in Whitehall as a problem –
an indirect diplomatic paramountcy over Egypt’s rulers was imagined to
be all that would be necessary to preserve stability and the unrestricted
development of commerce.
The Egyptian monarch, styled the Khedive, was formally subject to the
suzerainty of the Turkish sultan, but to all intents and purposes exercised
an independent power, which he used to authorise the canal and was re-
warded for his compliance with a block of shares in the enterprise. The
Egyptian regime of the time reproduced on a smaller stage that of its Turk-
ish overlord, effectively a military despotism which used coercive power
32 Global Expansion

to extract a surplus out of the basic agricultural producers and attempted to

push its rapacious hegemony southward up the Nile, bringing the popula-
tions of these regions into its taxation orbit. In the international commod-
ity markets cotton produced in the Nile valley had come to assume a grow-
ing importance, especially following the disruptions of the American Civil
War, and the newly opened canal promised to be a source of nearly limit-
less revenues.
The explosive combination of an archaic and decrepit semi-feudal state
structure with the influx of western capital, technology and financiers
soon resulted in bankruptcy for the monarch. The leading European pow-
ers responded in the manner to which they had become accustomed with
states such as those of Turkey or the South American republics. Viable as-
sets were bought out, in this case the Khedive’s Suez Canal shares, which
Disraeli, in a diplomatic coup, purchased on behalf of the British govern-
ment. European financial experts were imposed upon the monarch by a
consortium of the great powers to administer the Egyptian revenues and
extract the debt payments; the peasantry ‘now had the dubious benefits of
western efficiency in tax gathering’.3
The toilers on the land were not in a position to do much about their
grievances, but discontent crystalised in the peasant-based Egyptian army,
destablising the regime of informal European direction. Following several
years of political turmoil and insurrection, the British seized control of
the country in 1882 following the naval bombardment of Alexandria,
invasion of the country and defeat of the rebel Egyptian army.4 On paper
Egypt remained a Turkish province, with an international machinery of
debt collection, but was in actuality run by the British consul-general,
Evelyn Baring (later Lord Cromer). These developments were the respon-
sibility not of the overt imperialist Disraeli, but of his ostensibly anti-im-
perialist rival Gladstone, who covered them with a variety of implausible
and unconvincing justifications. In fact we know from the official record
that the Liberal government dithered and wittered over what course of
action to take: the outcome was nevertheless entirely satisfactory to the
bondholders and the financial interests involved, amply demonstrating
their capacity to shape the agenda even of supposedly unsympathetic ad-
ministrations.5

General Gordon and the Sudan

For the meantime, following these upheavals, the British made the Khedive
stop his attempts to extend his power southward, and the upper part of the
Nile, the Sudan, was abandoned to Muslim fundamentalists who in 1883
 The Drive into Africa 33

successfully revolted against Egyptian overlordship. Even this withdrawal,

however, had a significance in the annals of British imperialism, for it was
tied in with the death in 1885 of the egregious General Gordon – who had
delayed in Khartoum while exceeding his commission to organise the
evacuation of Sudanese Christians – at the hands of these same Sudanese
dervishes. His demise was turned into a resounding media event in Brit-
ain by a press, pulpit and music-hall lurching increasingly towards the
right and the imperial idea.6
According to The Times

The anxiety as to General Gordon’s safety is not confined to London,

or fomented by Opposition prints, as is sometimes suggested; it is dis-
cernible in the organs of all classes, those of the working men not ex-
cepted, and is plainly manifested in the North of England and Scotland,
the strongholds of Liberalism.7

Once news of Gordon’s death had reached Britain a day of national

mourning was proclaimed.
The incident did much to undermine Gladstone and his administration,
who were accused of ‘betrayal and desertion’ according to a leading church-
man, and brought sinister consequences too for domestic and especially
Irish policy, since its effect was to reinforce imperial intransigence and
unwillingness to compromise with supposedly inferior cultures. So far as
Africa was concerned, it became in due course an article of faith in West-
minster that the headwaters of the river in the hands of any rival Euro-
pean power would constitute an intolerable menace to the irrigation of
the entire Nile valley. Thus in the late 1890s, with imperial frenzy in both
official and popular circles rising to its peak, the reconquest of the Sudan
was deemed essential in view of a French expeditionary probe in that di-
rection from their colonies to the southwest. General Kitchener was ac-
cordingly dispatched to annihilate the dervish power along with tens of
thousands of dervishes and compel Colonel Marchand to remove the
French flag from a vital British interest which no British eye had hitherto
surveyed.
As noted, a clutch of European powers, great and small, were contempo-
raneously in the process of ravaging the continent and its populations. A
look at the map demonstrates that in the main the British possessions
tended, with some exceptions, to lie along a north–south axis between Cape
Town and Egypt, and those of France, the second major plunderer, in a
block from west to east – their intersection in 1898 brought the two pow-
ers into the confrontation on the Upper Nile. Around the edges were the
34 Global Expansion

prizes won by Germany, Portugal and Italy, and in the middle the enor-
mous and enormously wealthy personal fief of the Belgian king, Leopold II.
We have already noted the reluctance of Gladstone’s government in 1882
to undertake the invasion and virtual annexation of Egypt which it even-
tually carried through. Rather surprisingly, and apparently in contradic-
tion to the developing ideology of frenetic imperialism in the rival party,
the same attitudes tended to characterise the mostly Conservative admin-
istrations of the high imperialist era.8 It has to be remembered that the
ruling class was never a unified entity, and that even its principal sectors –
political, financial, administrative, landowning industrial, military – much
as they overlapped, were at the same time within themselves fragmented
and divided. For those with direct government responsibility imperial
excursions sponsored directly by the state meant expenditure (it might
even mean additional taxation), questions in the House, debates and the
possibility – as Gladstone discovered with Gordon – of acute embarrass-
ment if things went badly wrong.

Chartered Companies

It was therefore considered to be enormously preferable to have imperial

excursions undertaken indirectly and if possible at private expense – one
is almost tempted to describe them as private finance initiatives. To this
end British governments in the 1880s revived an institution enormously
important in the earlier phases of imperialism, but which had since the
1850s and the Indian revolt against the rule of the East India Company
fallen into discredit: namely the chartered company. These were in essence
commercial organisations equipped by the British state with governmen-
tal powers, including those of waging war and levying taxes. In respect of
the African partition three were established, the initiative in demanding
chartered status being taken by their proprietors, who regarded delegated
sovereignty as a necessary adjunct to their commercial operations if they
were to be enabled to realise the fabulous economic potential they envis-
aged in the African interior. They were respectively in dates of establish-
ment, the Royal Niger Company (RNC), the Imperial British East Africa
Company, and the British South Africa Company (BSAC).

East Africa
Of the three, the second of these, Ibea (as it was customarily entitled), was
the least substantial although its actions were still decisive for the imme-
diate and long-term future of millions of Africans. Founded by William
Mackinnon, a Scottish shipowner with India-based interests, it was formed
 The Drive into Africa 35

to exploit perceived golden opportunities inland from Zanzibar and ac-

quired its charter in 1888. In commercial terms, however, its progress be-
lied its promise, due partly to Mackinnon’s lack of competence and partly
to the company’s failure to exact subsidies for a railway link from an
economy-conscious government. However, it did succeed in imposing its
overlordship upon the African kingdoms to the south of Lake Victoria and
eastward to the Sultan of Zanzibar’s coastal territory – which was the quid
pro quo that Whitehall expected for the charter, a British presence in that
area on account of the official sensitivities about the Upper Nile, whose
source lay in that region.
Meantime in 1890 a formal protectorate was declared over Zanzibar and
the coastline,9 which since Bartle Frere’s treaty of 1872 with the sultan
the British had regarded as lying within their sphere. However, by the later
1880s commercial potential was evident and also the Germans were start-
ing to show an interest.10 The combination of state power and private fi-
nance was intended to be an economical solution, with the government
taking responsibility for the smaller and more easily controlled area and
the company for the geographically much more difficult regions of East
Africa.
This arrangement began to unravel, however, with Ibea’s bankruptcy
and threat to evacuate its newly acquired dominions. In response West-
minster and Whitehall showed a willingness to leave East Africa to its own
devices in the meantime, confident that the region had been diplomati-
cally insulated from rival predators. When the intention was made pub-
lic, however, the short-lived Liberal government (1892–95) was assailed
by an orchestrated campaign on the part of churches, press and chambers
of commerce, which compelled it to change course and erect protector-
ates over what became Uganda and inland Kenya. The lobbying groups
argued on the one hand that important commercial opportunities would
be lost if the Lakes region fell under the control of a protectionist power,
and on the other that Christian converts would be put in danger if removed
from European protection and the missionary work of the churches un-
done.
How important the latter could be was demonstrated much further south,
in the region around Lake Nyassa, to the south of German East Africa and
west of Mozambique. The initiative in this case had been taken by mis-
sionaries of the Church of Scotland and the Free Church of Scotland, who
had not confined themselves to preaching the gospel and philanthropic
activity in the tradition of Livingstone, but had assumed governing pow-
ers over the Africans, not excluding capital punishment. No British ad-
ministration, in the circumstances and the public feeling of the time, could
36 Global Expansion

possibly allow a territory in such a delicate condition to fall under foreign

control, and accordingly when the despised Portuguese threatened to an-
nex it the area was taken under British protection in 1891 as the Central
African Protectorate, later Nyasaland, now Malawi.

South and Central Africa

Twelve years after the Egyptian occupation, a long chain of territories
either claimed formally by Britain or reserved for subsequent occupation
stretched southward through the Rift valley and beyond, while from the
south another thrust, if anything even more unashamedly brutal and ra-
pacious, advanced to meet them. This too was the achievement of a char-
tered company. In South Africa the formal British colonies of Cape Colony
and Natal had coexisted uneasily since the earlier part of the century with
the semi-independent Boer republics of the Orange Free State and the
Transvaal (or South African Republic), all of them founded upon the sub-
jugation and reduction to servile agricultural labour of the black popula-
tion, though a certain minimum of African civic rights was preserved in
Cape Colony.11
In the 1860s, however, the world’s biggest concentration of diamonds
and in the 1880s of gold were found within the borders of the republics,
transforming white relations with the Africans, whose male population
now came into demand as cheap mining labour, and Boer relations with
the British, whose capital flooded in to exploit the opportunities, along
with the workforce,12 and whose governments now viewed the internal
politics of the South African eldorado as a crucial imperial concern. Large
numbers of non-Afrikaans whites, the ‘Uitlanders’ also entered the repub-
lics to take advantage of the demand for skilled labour which the mines
generated, but were denied citizenship by a government determined not
to allow its local culture to be swamped by these immigrants. The tangle of
political, commercial and ideological contradictions which these devel-
opments generated were embodied in the person of Cecil Rhodes, a mega-
lomaniac adventurer who made himself a millionaire by speculation in
the diamond trade, and backed by his enormous wealth entered Cape
Colony politics.
A mystic racist, stuffed with fantasies about the historic destiny of the
Anglo-Saxon stock and possessed with visions of an all-British hegemony
from ‘the Cape to Cairo’,13 Rhodes played upon London’s growing con-
cerns about possible ambitions for full independence and territorial ex-
pansion on the part of the Transvaal, possibly in collaboration with the
Portuguese or Germans, and by such means in 1889 secured a charter for
his own British South Africa Company14 to appropriate the strategically
 The Drive into Africa 37

important central African territories to the north (which might in addi-

tion contain equally fabulous concentrations of mineral wealth) before
any of the rivals could stake a claim.
Equipped with these advantages and the premiership of Cape Colony,
Rhodes recruited a gang of mercenaries and desperadoes and by-passing
the Transvaal dispatched them on a land-seizing expedition in the style of
Spanish conquistadores. The ‘treaty’ concluded with the most powerful of
the African rulers in the area is sufficiently illustrative of their methods:

Know all men by these presents that whereas Charles Dunnell Rudd of
Kimberly, Rochfort Maguire of London, and Francis Robert Thompson
of Kimberly ... the grantees, have covenanted and agreed ... to pay to
me, my heirs and successors the sum of one hundred pounds sterling
British currency on the first day of every lunar month and further to
deliver to my Royal Kraal one thousand Martini-Henry breech-loading
rifles, together with one hundred thousand rounds of suitable ball car-
tridges ... and further to deliver on the Zambesi River a steamboat with
guns suitable for defensive purposes ... I Lo Bengula, King of the Matabele
... in the exercise of my sovereign powers ... do hereby grant and assign
unto the said grantees ... the complete and exclusive charge over all
metals and minerals situated and contained in my kingdom ... and to
grant no concessions of land or mining rights from and after this date
without their consent and concurrence.15

When Lobenguela understood the claims he was supposed to have con-

ceded he tried to denounce the treaty, so Rhodes’s agents proceeded from
the force of diplomacy to the diplomacy of force. African resistance was
soon subdued, their land and cattle plundered and company rule imposed
in the new territories, which Rhodes naturally had named after himself.
The Cape-to-Cairo project was thereby realised, apart from a single gap
created by the existence of German East Africa (Tanganyika).

Nigeria
In another part of the continent, British colonial possessions were clus-
tered in separate sections along the coastal bulge of West Africa, all of them
expanded from the stations which were nearly abandoned in the 1860s.
The construction of the largest, Nigeria, was also intimately associated with
the appearance of a chartered company. The great river had been in the
eighteenth century a highway for the conveyance of human cargoes to
the slave ships waiting for them at the coast, and in its enormous delta
African monarchs who thrived as middlemen in the business had estab-
38 Global Expansion

lished a group of small but wealthy kingdoms or ‘city states’. With the
abandonment of the human commerce the former British slavers, mostly
based on Liverpool, and the delta rulers with whom they were linked, had
diversified into vegetable and palm oil, which, as the principal basis for
soap manufacture in Britain, found a ready market.
Local trade wars, both metaphorical and literal, erupted in the delta when
a Glasgow firm tried with some success to compete with the Liverpool cartel
and expand the area of the trade up the river to the extent that it was navi-
gable. In a fashion increasingly characteristic of the late nineteenth cen-
tury the dispute was settled by amalgamation. The resulting conglomer-
ate, the National African Company under Sir George Goldie, an opportunist
merchant, was accorded chartered status and a government-backed trade
monopoly in 1886 as the Royal Niger Company. As with eastern, south-
ern and central Africa the motive was to retain – on the cheap – as large a
region as possible within the sphere of British economic and political
hegemony, a purpose that fitted admirably with the commercial aims of
the local interests and their backers.
The company was authorised to

carry on business and to act as merchants, bankers, traders, commis-

sion agents, ship-owners, carriers, or in any other capacity in the United
Kingdom, Africa or elsewhere. And to import, export, buy, sell, barter,
exchange, pledge, make advances upon or otherwise deal in goods, pro-
duce, articles and merchandize ...
To form or acquire and carry on trading stations, factories, stores,
and depots in Africa or elsewhere ...
… and whereas ... the Kings, Chiefs, and other peoples of various
territories in the basin of the River Niger ... have ceded the whole of
their respective territories to the Company ... and whereas the Com-
pany ... have purchased the business of all the European traders in the
region aforesaid and are now the sole European traders ...
... to hold and retain the full benefit of the several cessions aforesaid
or any of them, and all rights, interests, authorities, and powers for the
purposes of government, preservation of public order, protection of the
said territories, or otherwise of what nature or kind soever.16

The charter went on to prohibit the RNC from establishing a trade mo-
nopoly, or discriminating commercially against foreign nationals, but ef-
fectively negated the significance of that prohibition by stipulating that
‘foreigners alike with British subjects will be subject to administrative dis-
positions in the interests of commerce and order’.
 The Drive into Africa 39

The Company exacted over 350 treaties from potentates in the north-
ern part of what was to become Nigeria (the British government having
already established a protectorate over what was then known as the Oil
Rivers – the Niger delta). Its agents carried with them sheaves of blank
treaty forms, which varied marginally according to circumstances, but
typically took the following form:

Treaty made on the day of, 18, between the Chiefs of on the one
hand, and the Royal Niger Company (Chartered and Limited) ...
1. We, the undersigned Chiefs of, with the consent of our people, and
with the view of bettering their condition, do on this day cede to the
Company, and their assigns, for ever, the whole of our territory; but the
Company shall pay private owners a reasonable amount for any por-
tion of land that the Company may require from time to time.17
2. We hereby give to the Company and their assigns, for ever, full juris-
diction of every kind; and we pledge ourselves not to enter into any
war with other tribes without the sanction of the Company.
3. We also give to the Company and their assigns, for ever, the sole right
to mine in our territory ...
... we hereby approve, and accept it for ourselves and our people with
their consent, and in testimony of this, having no knowledge of writ-
ing,18 do affix our marks below it, and I, , for and on behalf of the
Company, do hereby affix my hand ...

It can be acknowledged that compared to the ‘treaty’ (known as the Rudd

Concession) by which Rhodes’s agent established the BSAC claim to
Matebeleland the RNC counterpart appears almost as a model of legal re-
straint and responsibility
The RNC went on to acquire, by such diplomacy or by force when nec-
essary, the northern half of the future Nigeria, bringing into its orbit an
enormous territory incorporating the utmost diversity of ethnic group-
ings, religions and cultures. The government in London was well satis-
fied, for it had the objective in mind of preventing the French from gain-
ing any colonial foothold on the navigable stretch of the lower Niger, and
this the Company successfully accomplished. In 1899 the RNC had its
charter withdrawn, but by then it hardly mattered, for the government,
prodded by the arch-imperialist Joseph Chamberlain, assumed responsi-
bility for maintaining political control and the company was entrenched
in the commercially dominant position from which it went on to form a
central component in the Unilever commercial empire of the twentieth
century.
40 Global Expansion

The institution of the three chartered companies between 1886 and 1889
reflected the fact that by the middle of the decade Africa had assumed the
position of a zone of contention for territory and influence among the
powers of western Europe and marked a novel stage of the coalescence of
governmental power with the projects of particular commercial organi-
sations. The resulting competition, confrontation and shifting alliances
between the participating states during the 1880s and 1890s foreshadowed
and rehearsed their greater and more strongly directed appetites during
the first decade of the twentieth century, as well as the tightening of mili-
tary partnerships which were only resolved in the end with the outbreak
of a general European war.19

Imperial Rivalries

However, that was for later. Armed hostilities between the rival colonisers
threatened from time to time in the course of the African scramble but
never actually broke out. On the face of it the explanation might appear to
be that the consolidated blocs which ultimately went to war were yet to
fully develop the political and military tendencies which led to that out-
come. In the 1880s these were still embryonic. While it is true that what
was only a potential in 1884 had thirty years later developed into a cer-
tainty, the reasons for the avoidance of European war over Africa was not
so much because the pressures pushing towards it were less than they were
in Europe in 1914, but because the stakes and the risks were always high
and reached far beyond Africa while none of Great Britain’s rivals found it
worthwhile to challenge it where vital interests were at stake.
The nature of capitalism as a world system in the 1880s, within a frame-
work of nation states evolved in an earlier phase of social development,
already pointed towards the likelihood of a generalised conflict at some
point in the future to settle the question of global ascendancy. Each par-
ticipant was even by that time well down the road (despite immediate world
recession) in the expansion of its industrial potential and new technolo-
gies, with massive investment in improved firepower. The diplomatic/
military quadrille had already begun, but Africa was never a suitable
theatre in which to initiate the conflict.
The global stakes were far too important to endanger for any particular
economic gain or favourable media publicity in a faraway African (or
Asiatic) outpost. In practice, whenever a dispute of such a kind appeared,
after a space of diplomatic posturing and bellicose publicity the power that
was locally weakest on the ground conceded the claim. Since Britain,
thanks to its position on the Nile and the Niger and on the southern edge
 The Drive into Africa 41

of the continent, not to speak of its world-beating navy, was invariably

the strongest player, it naturally won the confrontations it regarded as really
important, though sometimes conceding claims whenever a useful trade-
off might be achieved.

The Berlin Conference

The fact that by the mid-1880s the race to dismember Africa was obviously
in train led among the powers to the search for rules by which it might be
regulated, ones designed to minimise so far as possible the dangers of an
unforeseen explosion resulting from actions on the part of their agents
over which the home governments had no immediate control. In 1885
the West African Conference met in Berlin – including representatives
from the USA – to specify ground rules for annexation and takeover. The
title was misleading, for the scope of the discussions and line-rulings on
the map covered the whole of the continent.
The conference had to deal with the ownership of Africa. It did not
specify to whom every square kilometre was to belong – although certainly
it was assumed that none of it belonged to the Africans – but allocated some
slices that were the subject of immediate covetousness, and for the remain-
der stipulated what was to count for recognition as effective occupation in
the future. Among the former arrangements the principal decision was to
settle the future of the Congo river and its basin.
This gigantic waterway drained most of the rainforest area of central
Africa but was rendered unnavigable to the sea by precipitous falls and
rapids only a few kilometres from its mouth. But for this geographical ac-
cident there can be little doubt that European penetration, regardless of
the very unfavourable climate, would have been extended far upriver at a
much earlier stage. The Portuguese indeed were already entrenched on
the short navigable stretch. No European had any idea of what the eco-
nomic potential of the rainforest might turn out to be, but hopes were high:
preliminary probes by small expeditions showed that it abounded in at
least two commodities in high contemporary demand – ivory and wild
rubber.
British interests were attracted but, unlike the other two great continen-
tal rivers, no close connection of a historic or contemporary nature could
be plausibly advanced. The costs and difficulties of direct British occupa-
tion and control were unthinkable, but cabinets, whether Liberal or Con-
servative, took it for granted that it was worth making very considerable
efforts to ensure an open door for British commerce and speculation in
this land of tropical promise. It was hoped at first that the aim could be
42 Global Expansion

attained through an arrangement with the weak power already in situ, the
Portuguese, albeit this state was notoriously protectionist, but strenuous
objections were voiced by British commercial interests acting through the
Chambers of Commerce of big cities, especially Manchester. French and
German interests objected no less strenuously, and the British government
could not afford to alienate both its own merchants and two major foreign
powers – hence the conference.
In the event, since the main powers could not acceptably compose their
mutual suspicions and rivalries, the river basin and much more beside was
handed over to the royal entrepreneur who since the 1870s, had been
energetically lobbying the various governments for the concession with
public propaganda and behind-the-scenes intrigue, and who had sent H.
M. Stanley with an armed force to the river to give material backing to his
claims. For the British, French and German governments it represented a
more than adequate compromise, relieving them of the expense and re-
sponsibility of opening up, policing and defending this enormous entity
but with – they thought – an open door and the continuing hope of pick-
ing up the pieces if King Leopold’s initially rickety Congo Free State were
to collapse. Portuguese objections could be discounted: it was a minor
power. Moreover, the Belgian monarch had made solemn promises to
maintain a regime of free trade and religious and humanitarian endeav-
our – undertakings which he broke at once to seize exclusive commercial
access and install a colonial machine of unabashed criminality, grisly even
by the accepted imperial standards.

The Boer Republics

European inter-state disputes over Africa in the subsequent fifteen years

were not always so smoothly and amicably resolved as at Berlin, but they
were never allowed to escalate to the level of having to be settled by mili-
tary force. The one occasion when a European power did have to commit
serious human and monetary resources was of a different sort, though not
without its overtones of international threat. The existence of the Boer
republics, whose culturally offensive rulers grew more intransigent the
more mineral royalties enhanced their state income, represented an
anomaly from the point of view of British capital and British power, the
more so as German finance, with cheap loans and sympathy, tried to use
them as an entry point to the fabulous riches of the Rand.
Various schemes were employed to ensure their due subservience. Brit-
ain claimed a vaguely defined paramountcy and control over their exter-
nal affairs. They were shut off from expansion westward, northward or
 The Drive into Africa 43

from the acquisition of a coastline. In 1895 Cecil Rhodes sponsored a pri-

vate-enterprise coup d’état to overthrow the Transvaal government and
install a more accommodating one. Its spectacular failure left full-scale
warfare as the only remaining recourse, which duly broke out four years
later. In a number of ways the South African War (1899–1902) marked the
climax of British imperialism in view both of its scale – the Boers resisted
effectively and were subdued with great difficulty – and of its objectives,
which were nothing less than to bring the incalculably valuable goldfields,
central to the stability of world finance, and their labour force under an
acceptable British-aligned regime. At the same time, the war and eventual
victory, although it aroused temporary ecstasies of rejoicing among the
British public, stimulated considerable opposition as well, and almost
universally unfavourable foreign reaction to British conquest of the re-
publics revealed the degree of international isolation into which the state
had drifted and the urgent necessity of mended fences and tighter diplo-
matic–military ties with one or other of the two European military blocs
in the process of formation.

Official Attitudes

Looking in broad measure from a British perspective at the conquests,

annexations and quasi-annexations in Africa between the 1870s and the
end of the century, the central reality for all involved was that ultimately
only the government could make legally binding treaties, offer long-term
protection, wage prolonged war or claim international recognition – al-
though as we have noted, some of these powers could be leased out. Any-
one, therefore, who was anxious for any of these things to happen had to
bring Downing Street and Westminster into the equation, either in a di-
rect role or as a source of delegated authority. It is remarkable that with a
few minor exceptions they nearly always succeeded in doing so. Prime
ministers, foreign secretaries and cabinets, who had their own, and in their
own eyes usually more important, business to attend to were well aware
that as the continent was increasingly brought within the circuits of in-
ternational capital movements, Britain could not afford to be left out of
the bargaining. Generally, the administrations would have preferred to
attain their objectives without assuming direct responsibility, but equally
in most cases that option was not long available. As Victor Kiernan puts it:

Wavering between objective and subjective – between what ministers

were really doing or allowing to be done, and what they liked to think
or wanted others to think, they were doing – grows more pronounced.
44 Global Expansion

Conquest of the Sudan and the Transvaal ‘at first sight ... might suggest
a full-blooded drive for empire’: but ... ‘this was not how ministers saw
their onslaughts’. Finally we see another old premier, sick and sorry,
brought face to face with realization that the jingo party had rigged
things in such a way that he and Britain must go to war – ‘and all for
people who we despise, and for territory which will bring no profit and
no power to England’. In other words Lord Salisbury simply did not
know why the Boer War was about to be fought.20

By the time the Boers capitulated all major objectives in Africa were
apparently achieved, but the realisation was beginning to dawn, even
among some of the most convinced and obsessive imperialists, that the
problems of consolidating that success into a permanent and tightly knit
asset were only beginning.

Further Reading
P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion 1688–
1914; Longman, 1993.
M.E. Chamberlain, The Scramble for Africa, Longman, 1974.
C.C. Eldridge, Victorian Imperialism, Hodder & Stoughton, 1978.
John E. Flint, Sir George Goldie and the Making of Nigeria, Oxford University Press,
1960.
J.S. Galbraith, Crown and Charter: The Early Years of the British South Africa Com-
pany, University of California Press, 1974.
J.S. Galbraith, Mackinnon and East Africa 1878–1895, Cambridge University Press,
1972.
L.H. Gann and Peter Duigan, The Rulers of British Africa 1870–1914, Croom Helm,
1978. Written from a pro-imperial standpoint.
W.G. Hynes, The Economics of Empire: Britain, Africa and the New Imperialism 1870–
1895, Longman, 1975.
V.G. Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969. Discusses
imperial attitudes.
J.M. MacKenzie, The Partition of Africa, Methuen, 1983. Brief but informative.
J. Forbes Munro, Britain in Tropical Africa 1880–1960, Macmillan, 1984. Concise
and useful.
Ronald Olivier and G.N. Sanderson (eds), The Cambridge History of Africa, Vol. 6,
c. 1870–1905, Cambridge University Press, 1985.
R. Robinson and J. Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians, Macmillan, 1961. The clas-
sic ‘revisionist’ interpretation, downplaying economic considerations.
3
Other Extensions

If the partition of Africa was the most spectacular theatre of imperial ex-
pansion in the late nineteenth century, it was far from being the only one.
From any rational perspective the Pacific and Indian oceans were of far
greater importance than Africa to the imperial powers, even if the devel-
opments taking place in the eastern hemisphere at that time were on the
whole less noisy and colourful.

India

According to Cain and Hopkins, ‘the full value of British rule, the return
on political investments first made in the eighteenth century, was not
realised until the second half of the nineteenth century, when India be-
came a vital market for Lancashire’s cotton goods and when other specialised
interests, such as jute manufacturers in Dundee and steel producers in
Sheffield also increased their stake in the sub-continent’.1 The importance
to the cotton textile industry can be measured by the anxiety with which
Lancashire merchants, led by the Manchester Chamber of Commerce,
scrutinised the endeavours made by the Indian government to levy rev-
enue duties on cotton goods and the success with which they usually got
them blocked or lowered – though in other respects their efforts to influ-
ence government action were much less successful.
Trade, however, was only one aspect of India’s importance. It absorbed
£286 million of the capital raised on the London stock market between
1865 and 1913, around 18 per cent of the empire’s total, and second in
importance to Canada for such investment.2 India itself became a base for
the further extension of the investment network, with the National Bank
of India, founded in Calcutta in 1863, establishing offices in Ceylon, Burma
and East Africa. Among its directors was Sir William Mackinnon, the same

45
46 Global Expansion

individual whose Imperial British East Africa Company played a signifi-

cant role, as noted in Chapter 2, in bringing about annexations in that
area. Not only that, he was a close friend of Bartle Frere – whose influence
we have encountered at several points already – and, as Cain and Hopkins
express it, ‘cultivated connections’ with civil servants in a position to fur-
ther his interests. The successor to Mackinnon’s commercial empire, James
Mackay, was so well connected that he only just failed to become Viceroy
of India.
However, important though commercial connections with India un-
doubtedly were, it was financial ones that were really central. Towards the
end of the century external debt burdens were so heavy that revenue from
taxation and exports could no longer cover them and payments could only
be balanced by borrowing. The debt to external creditors amounted to half
the value of the country’s exports. One of the crucial advantages of free
trade was that it enabled surpluses earned by India from trade with Eu-
rope, Asia and the United States to be used to clear its deficit with the UK,
and ‘this in turn was vital to the maintenance of the pattern of multilateral
settlements which enabled Britain, in turn, to settle more than two-fifths
of her own trading deficits’.3 Since local Indian manufactures helped to
reduce imports and thus the deficit, the government in India actually
tended to favour them as against British exporters.
The exchange rate of the rupee against sterling also presented problems
of a highly complex nature. The eventual solution, reached towards the
end of the century, was, as Cain and Hopkins demonstrate, favourable to
financial and City interests and disappointing to British manufacturers,
particularly cotton producers. The essence of British relations with the
subcontinent is well summed up by these two authors: ‘The twin impera-
tives of holding the Raj together and keeping faith with external creditors
exercised a pervasive, almost determining, effect on British policy in In-
dia.’4 In short, the nature of the empire in India cannot be understood
merely with reference to what was happening in India itself, or even in
the sphere of Anglo-Indian relationships alone. It becomes comprehen-
sible only when the Indian empire is understood as a component in a glo-
bal system. Cain and Hopkins normally avoid eloquent passages, but they
permit themselves one when stating their conclusion in relation to India:
‘By perceiving these connections, we can improve our appreciation of the
value of the jewel in the crown and the reasons for keeping it polished
and protected.’5
 Other Extensions 47

East Asia

China
On the face of things the dealings of British government and British capi-
tal in China were far closer to a textbook illustration of the Leninist model
of imperial relationships growing directly out of state-supported monopoly
capitalism seeking cheap investment opportunities than anything that
happened in Africa. Moreover, the rivalries of European powers – and of
the USA – in China were of an explicit and wholly unmistakable economic
character.
Since the seventeenth century European writers and observers had
voiced astonishment at the size and sophistication of the Ch’ing empire,
its mechanical ingenuity, despite the lack of the power sources employed
in Europe, and the range of artefacts produced by its industrious and multi-
tudinous populace. They had been no less impressed by its apparent social
and political stability, attributed to the probity and philosophic under-
standing of its intensively literate and educated administrative class.
The prospects for trade relations appeared to be excellent, and indeed in
the eighteenth century a very significant commerce developed, conducted
through the East India Company, which acquired a legal monopoly of
British trade. The Chinese commodities which supplied not only a British
market, but, through British middlemen, a European one, were principally
tea and silks. In the absence of any comparable Chinese demand for west-
ern products, the balance was at this stage cleared in silver.
Changing circumstances in the earlier part of the nineteenth century
destabilised the structure. At the same time as a dynamic British economy,
subject nonetheless to recurrent trade cycles and contracted markets,
sought fresh commercial outlets, shortage of silver specie presented a grow-
ing and serious obstacle to the China trade, while in 1833 the East India
Company lost its monopoly, thereby multiplying the number of would-be
participants in Chinese commerce. A solution was discovered, however,
in the shape of opium, produced in India and shipped to China,6 which
proved an effective substitute for silver. The Ch’ing state was by this time
in an advanced state of political decay and weakening central authority,
but, concerned at what the opium trade was doing to the public health of
its subjects, tried to prohibit the transactions and was so disrespectful of
property rights as to have stocks of the drug seized and destroyed. The re-
sponse of the British, supported by other European powers and the USA,
was to use its superior weaponry to compel the Chinese authorities to ac-
commodate themselves to western notions of civilisation and opium con-
sumption. By 1860, after the fighting was over, in two separated phases, a
48 Global Expansion

network of institutions had been put in place specifically designed to bring

China irreversibly within the sphere of world exchange and the circuits
of capital accumulation.
A British commercial base was established by the seizure, under the pre-
text of a lease, of Hong Kong. Around the coast treaty ports, with European
rights of extra-territoriality, were designed to tap the presumed enormous
interior trade, and they were intended to be ‘bridgeheads to the interior,
releasing the export potential of the hinterland and acting as funnels for a
return trade in goods from Britain and India’.7 The Son of Heaven was
obliged to accept foreign officials stationed in his capital to exert direct
pressure whenever required. Above all, to meet the heavy financial in-
demnities levied upon the Chinese government by the victors, control of
customs collection in the Chinese ports was placed under the supervision
of a British inspector-general.
A significant trade did develop in the treaty and other ports, but it had to
be handled through Chinese middlemen, the ‘comparador bourgeoisie’,
and came nowhere near to fulfilling the extravagant expectations associ-
ated with it. Trade with the interior remained obstinately underdeveloped,
partly on account of institutional obstacles but to a much greater extent
simply because of cultural resistance from the Chinese population to im-
ported European manufactures. This disappointment, however, emphati-
cally did not mean that commercial opportunities were absent in relation
to China: other means existed of extracting a profit – ‘as much in the man-
agement of the funds and exchanges as in any other way’.8 The most re-
nowned Far East expatriate firm, Jardine Matheson & Co., abandoned the
opium trade in the 1870s to diversify into shipping, banking and traffick-
ing in money rather than goods. More advanced still in this field was the
Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, which, as well as being a commercial
enterprise, handled the funds both of the colonial government of the is-
land and of the customs administration.
The Bank’s great opportunity arrived when from the mid-1870s the
Ch’ing rulers themselves began to contract foreign loans on the security
of the customs income. On the first of these, the British Minister in Peking
was a major subscriber, mixing business with diplomacy. For the remain-
der of the century, using its standing in the City of London and the inter-
connections noted above,9 the bank floated most of these loans on Peking’s
behalf, particularly following the latter’s defeat by the rising military im-
perialism of Japan in 1895 and imposition of another huge indemnity.10 In
view of such (scarcely voluntary) closer relations with the west, to which
was added in 1900 the trauma of conjoint intervention by various powers
to suppress the popular insurrection known as the Boxer Rising, the long-
 Other Extensions 49

term passive resistance by Peking to European commercial penetration of

the interior began to buckle.
Concessions for railway construction and mining operations (Cain and
Hopkins refer to ‘vast allocations’) began to be handed out, particularly in
the Yangtze valley, assumed to be the most promising area for opening up.
Investment syndicates from all over Europe sprang up like mushrooms to
exploit the new potential, with British ones very much in the forefront
and those already well entrenched in a specially favourable position.
Jardine Matheson combined with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank to
set up the British and Chinese Corporation, which was additionally con-
nected to Rothschilds and Barings in the City. Another British syndicate
was linked to South African mining interests.
The closest relations existed between the most powerful of these con-
sortia and the British Foreign Office, which backed with enthusiasm the
operations of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank and underwrote loans to
develop the new concessions. The bank’s founder was for a time Chair-
man of the P & O shipping line and an MP from 1884 until 1900. The
manager of the bank was effectively the author of a new treaty imposed by
Britain on the Ch’ing following the eradication of the Boxers. It specified
among other things a uniform currency and a national bank, with adop-
tion of the gold standard as a long-term aim.
Only a modest measure of railway construction and no blossoming of
European industrial enterprise in China followed in the wake of these trea-
ties, loans and concessions, much to the annoyance of the Foreign Office.
There is no mystery about the disappointing and apparently paradoxical
outcome. European capital in general and British in particular was attracted
to the prospect of high returns with minimal risk. That was to be found, it
was hoped and expected, through trade in the products of China’s indig-
enous handicraft industries and agricultural output, or better still in finan-
cial transactions, most attractively government borrowing, if the repay-
ments could be made secure. Local antagonism to European practices,
whatever the supine central government might decree, might make long-
term investment in the deep interior very risky indeed, as the Boxers
dramatically emphasised, but unlike the South American states or the
Ottoman sultanate, the Ch’ing empire maintained its credit rating and was
never in default. It is not to be wondered at therefore that British capital
preferred as far as possible to stick to the coast where European power could
be brought to bear or to seek safety in banking and handling safe govern-
ment loans.
The capacity of the Ch’ing and its administrative apparatus to screw lim-
itless resources out of its long-suffering population to service the debt was
50 Global Expansion

probably the central reason why the empire was never partitioned. There
were certainly others. The stupefying expense and difficulty of actually
controlling large tracts of Chinese territory were undoubtedly a major
deterrent to the powers (though in the end it failed to deter Japanese impe-
rialism). However, by the later years of the century the British, though
maintaining their lead, no longer had the field almost exclusively to them-
selves: international competition was growing stronger. In the 1880s the
French seized what Peking regarded as its own tropical provinces of Indo-
China,11 and a decade later not only Japan but France, Germany and Rus-
sia were chasing loans, concessions, influence and, in the case of Japan
and Russia, manageable bits of peripheral territory.
From the British point of view, however, maintenance of the central
authority was a far preferable option,12 partly because the Europeans could
bully it into enforcing order in the European interest for the benefit of
traders, missionaries, concession hunters and collections of expatriate
Europeans. The use of direct European power to suppress the Boxers was a
unique undertaking; there could be no question of keeping a joint mili-
tary presence on permanent duty to police the enormous country. Even
more to the point, a functioning Ch’ing government was the best guaran-
tee available that customs officers and tax collectors would continue to
operate, that the debt repayments would continue to be met and that the
large investment sunk into the loans over the years would be kept out of
danger.13
Nevertheless, had the accelerating political decay at the centre after 1900
threatened to end with the breakup of the empire, an attempt would prob-
ably have been made, in spite of formidable risks and difficulties and as
a last resort for ‘maintaining order’, to partition the country, probably
through some form of international agreement that would accommodate
the diverse interests and states clamouring to get themselves more fa-
vourably positioned at the trough. The actual course of events, however,
demonstrates that there were good reasons why an imperialist policy might
seek to avoid partition and find its interests – depending on whose these
interests were – better served by the maintenance of semi-colony status
rather than going the entire distance to annexation. Evidently, the long-
established and well-entrenched British saw matters from a different per-
spective than the intrusive Japanese.
Feudal China was entering its final crisis, eroded by the same processes
of historic decrepitude that had destroyed preceding dynasties and fatally
undermined by the popular hatred that its subservience to foreign powers
evoked among the people. Its end did not take the form of secession by
provincial leaders but collapse at the centre. In 1911 revolution in the
 Other Extensions 51

capital overthrew the monarchy, and ‘overturned the regime supported

by the foreign powers, raised the possibility of default on existing loans
and opened up the prospect of a renewed scramble for China’,14 but since
the revolutionaries looked towards western political and cultural models,
the situation, from an imperialist standpoint, might yet be saved. The For-
eign Office and the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank moved quickly, to es-
tablish an International Commission of Bankers so as to avert uncontrol-
lable foreign rivalries; to back Yuan Shih-K’ai, the political general most
likely to preserve the financial status quo; and to advance the loan which
enabled him to seize control of the government and suppress the demo-
cratic revolutionaries. They might have saved themselves the trouble. No
long-term stability could hope to emerge from such manoeuvres and the
country was to remain in a state of crisis-ridden disintegration for decades
to come – but within three years European war was to transform the cir-
cumstances both of China and the world.

Japan
By contrast with the constant worries over the stability of the Chinese
state and its threatened collapse from time to time, British financiers and
British governments were more than gratified by the alacrity and commit-
ment with which its Japanese counterpart adjusted to the realities of the
global accumulation regime. The adoption of western models in economic
and military affairs, administration and, to some degree, cultural practices
such as diet and clothing, were happily funded with western loans. The
Japanese experience was a model of what British imperialism would have
liked to see occur on the mainland opposite – all the merchants and inves-
tors wanted was a stable regime with an open door for trade and, more
importantly, lending. By the beginning of the twentieth century Japan was
judged to be sufficiently civilised and militarily formidable to be accepted
as Britain’s formal ally – the first such specific commitment the British
government had made since the rival European alliance systems began to
form in the 1870s.
The consolidation of capitalist relations in southern Asia and around
the eastern Pacific during the late nineteenth century was a general and
multinational tendency and where suitable ‘native’ authorities could not
be found capable of holding the framework together, occupation and an-
nexation followed.15 Since the seventeenth century the Dutch had claimed
suzerainty over the greater part of the Indonesian archipelago, an invalu-
able producer of spices; but their effective occupation was for a long time
limited, mostly to the island of Java and not even all of that. In the later
nineteenth century the effective conquest of all the territories in their
52 Global Expansion

internationally acknowledged sphere of influence was seriously put in

hand, constituting one of the less well-known bloody passages in estab-
lishing the era of European world hegemony.16

South East Asia

The British extended their hegemony in Burma and in North Borneo as
well as in Malaya, the latter proving itself to be a metaphorical gold mine
when it was discovered that its climate and soil were ideal for the cultiva-
tion of imported rubber plants, and that large deposits of tin were avail-
able for exploitation.17 The Malayan peninsula did not, however, possess,
unlike Siam or China, a unified monarchy which could be recruited as an
imperial agent, and so the British, to establish control, had to deal with a
host of minor potentates, who were placed in a position equivalent to that
of the Indian princes under the British Raj. Formally Malaya, apart from
the Straits Settlements, was not a colony but a series of protectorates (from
1896 the Federated Malay States). The local potentates were ruled by Brit-
ish ‘advisers’ who controlled revenue, land allocation, police, public works
and medical services. The Governor of the Straits Settlements expressed
the official view succinctly:

I concur with Sir William Robinson in thinking that did we so aban-

don them their state would probably be worse than it was when we
first intervened. I do not think that anything could justify us in leaving
them to anarchy, and our own interests as well as theirs forbid it –
Nothing that we have done has taught them to govern themselves, we
are merely teaching them to co-operate with us under our guidance ...
Moreover I doubt if Asiatics will ever learn to govern themselves, it is
contrary to the genius of their race, of their history, of their religious
systems that they should – Their desire is a mild, just and firm despo-
tism; that we can give them.18

The innumerable small and tiny islands of the Melanesian, Polynesian

and Micronesian archipelagos did not escape the share-out but were swept
up by the imperial broom into British, French or German possession. They
had no great material resources to offer, but stations on shipping routes
were not unimportant and their male populations were available for re-
cruitment, by voluntary or compulsory means, as labour supply in other
parts of the empires.
 Other Extensions 53

South America

In the southern portion of the opposite hemisphere there was only one
formal British colony, the important sugar-producing British Guiana, but
the ostensibly independent states of South America formed both a cardi-
nal element in the network of global financial and commercial dominance
and contained the most massive concentration of overseas British capital
to be found anywhere – not excluding the settlement colonies.
The last of the great pre-industrial commercial wars19 ended in 1815
with the unquestionable and unchallengable ascendancy of British com-
mercial capital around the world, aggressively seeking fresh opportuni-
ties and new fields for expansion. The decrepit Spanish and Portuguese
empires offered tempting prizes, once they could be transformed into in-
dependent states maintaining close commercial, political and cultural
links with Britain. The states that came into being were indeed British
proteges, being protected by the British navy and British diplomatic ef-
forts from any threatened reconquest by the Iberian monarchies. More-
over, in Chile and even more so in Argentina, the new ruling classes of
landowners and foreign-trading merchants did absorb, to an extraordi-
nary degree, British economic and cultural values of a liberal but anti-demo-
cratic sort. Repression of the independently minded gaucho frontiersmen
and extermination of the still-unsubdued Amerindians in Argentina were
policies seen as essential to the unity and stability of the new state and
pressed upon its rulers by London.
Brazil, whose political form was at first a monarchy – which pleased the
Foreign Office – and whose social structure at independence was founded
upon slavery – which did not – was a slightly different case, though the
outcome in the end amounted to much the same thing. The British forced
the Brazilian government to outlaw the slave trade (though it continued to
be practised illegally) and ultimately pressured it into abolishing slavery as
an institution (as late as 1888). These measures enormously increased the
leverage that the Foreign Office had over the governing Brazilian elite, since
it became its only reliable upholder in the face of outraged Brazilian land-
owners who resented the interference with the slave system, and of the
Brazilian educated classes who resented the subordination of their country.
In 1889 the monarchy was overthrown and succeeded by a republic. Simi-
lar relations continued with the new authorities. According to Cain and
Hopkins, ‘despite its long association with the Brazilian monarchy, the City
did not allow sentiment to extend to the point of backing a loser’.20
However, in the first half of the century, despite gratifying political suc-
cess, the chronic crisis of the British economy between 1820 and 1850
54 Global Expansion

during its transition from a hand-manufacturing to a machine-industry

mode, reacted upon foreign trade and resulted in severe disappointments
so far as South America was concerned: considerable investments were
lost. Matters changed dramatically in the second half as railway construc-
tion provided both transport systems and opportunities for what had be-
come relatively safe investment. Brazilian rubber and coffee, Argentinian
beef and wheat, Chilean copper and nitrates then flowed towards Britain
and Europe in an ever-expanding stream, providing further opportunities
for shipping, services and investment.
These commercial opportunities, however, were entirely outshone by
those created from government borrowing in the South American repub-
lics. This indeed was the crucial relationship and the lever by which their
governments, regardless of political complexion, were controlled from
London. ‘Control’ in this instance did not mean close supervision on the
ground, but a commitment to continue interest payments and maintain
the open trading system, imposing only moderate duties on trade suffi-
cient to finance the administration and meet the debt payments but not to
interfere with foreign operations. The ability to raise loans in London was
regarded as the most vital of lifelines for the South American oligarchies
and no government would have dared to act in a manner likely to damage
its credit rating in London. There is no reason to think that this depen-
dency was even greatly resented by the elites of the republics, so thorough
had been their absorption of British cultural values, though on occasion,
when financial crisis had produced the danger of default, anxiety was
expressed that force might be employed by the British navy to rectify the
situation. American observers and diplomats would grumble that Buenos
Aires or Valparaiso were English cities in everything but name and lan-
guage. From the point of view of the British investor, the British diplomat
or the British politician, it was the best of all possible worlds: the condi-
tions of profitability maintained by reliable and accommodating Euro-
pean-descended local authorities and requiring no embarrassing demands
upon the British taxpayer – ‘honorary dominions’ – the kind of set-up
that would have been acclaimed in Africa or China had the possibilities
existed. That the possibilities did not exist is the essential reason why
imperialism in the eastern hemisphere took the shape that it did. The
idyllic investment conditions in South America served as the foundation
for a debt burden that crushed the Argentinian cattlehand, the Chilean
miner or, in the most ghastly instance, the Brazilian Indian rubber-tapper
toiling in conditions of indescribable degradation.
The commodity trade between Britain and South America was very con-
siderable – Argentine exports to Britain in 1913, for example, exceeded
 Other Extensions 55

those of any settlement colony. Nevertheless, Britain’s share of the com-

modity trade with the continent was under continual pressure from rivals
in the later part of the nineteenth century and during the years up to 1914:
in fact it experienced steady decline. Partly it was a result of British firms
themselves shifting their operations to the formal empire. This, however,
represented no great problem from the point of view of British finance, for
it continued to carry, finance and insure the operations being conducted
by the intrusive German or US merchants. In fact, even as commodity trade
was declining, London’s financial stranglehold on the southern republics
was as steadily increasing, and German and US capital, though they tried,
proved utterly incapable of shifting British control of the banking systems
in the three states.

Turkish and Persian Empires

As with South America, it was during the earlier part of the nineteenth
century that the quasi-feudal Turkish empire became a diplomatic satellite
of Great Britain. The empire was administratively, politically and militar-
ily decayed, and without British intervention would have been obliter-
ated before too long by the southern expansion of the Tsar’s empire and
the defection of rebellious provincial satraps.
British intervention on its behalf was expressly designed to obstruct
Russian advance towards the sensitive middle eastern route to India and
the Pacific, and maintainance of its integrity (more or less) became one of
the central principles of British foreign policy. 21 It was hoped too that as a
by-product of British diplomatic influence administrative reform and a
liberal commercial regime would generate expanded trade relations.
Commodity exchange in fact remained very modest, but following the
Crimean War – an episode in the Anglo-Russian conflict – extensive for-
eign borrowing was embarked upon by the sultan’s regime. Funds were
attracted from London and Paris, but a dramatic turning-point in Turkish
affairs occurred in 1876 when the Ottoman government defaulted on its
foreign debt. Consequences were severe. To restore its creditworthiness
the regime had to surrender economic sovereignty to a consortium of credi-
tor nations, which proceeded to establish on Turkish territory the Otto-
man Public Debt Administration to collect the revenues themselves.22
Meantime, the North African provinces, in reality autonomous but still
Ottoman in international law, were being detached by Britain and France.
However, this political hulk, an imperial authority keeping itself in be-
ing by massacre and pillage practised on its own subjects, though of more
than trivial importance commercially, was of much greater interest to the
56 Global Expansion

British military and diplomatic service than to British investors. In fact

the Foreign Office would have liked to attract more investment than the
City was willing to subscribe, in order to reinforce its political influence –
influence which it lost in any case with the modernising Young Turk revo-
lution of 1908, being unable in this instance to carry out the same ma-
noeuvre as was to succeed temporarily in China. It was not until it became
apparent shortly before 1914 that the southern Ottoman provinces were
awash with oil that investors began to prick up their ears in a serious
manner, upon which Whitehall gladly extended to them financial and
diplomatic support. It was, of course, these same provinces which Britain
claimed as its prize after the Turkish defeat in World War I.23
To the east the Persian empire, afflicted with a similar but even less com-
mercially promising regime, received similar treatment. First coming un-
der British surveillance, like the Turkish empire, on account of its geographi-
cal relationship to India and concern that its collapse could bring Russian
power to the Indian Ocean, it stubbornly failed to attract more than a very
modest investment, in spite of Foreign Office encouragement of the Imperi-
al Bank of Persia founded by distinguished empire financiers, including
officials from Jardine Mathieson and the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.
As with the Arab provinces of the Ottoman empire, realisation of what
was to be found underneath the soil transformed the perception, though
in this case Britain was obliged to agree to a formal partition of the country
with its new ally, Russia.24 Following the war and the fall of Tsardom, Brit-
ish capital inherited complete control of the country’s mineral resources,
and from 1919 Persia was as much a lightly disguised British economic
and political colony as were Jordan or Iraq.

Conclusion

Consideration of the pattern of events in Asia and Latin America over the
decades in question shows at first glance a bewildering variety of actions,
motives and responses by the imperial powers, Britain in particular. The
straightforward territorial annexations which occurred, especially on the
part of the French, the Dutch, the Russian empire and the new imperial
power, Japan, were only the most simple and direct forms of imperial ad-
vance. In the main, however, relations tended to be more complicated, and
in general the preference was to leave in place a facade of local sovereignty.
In Latin America, indeed, there was no alternative, both on account of
cultural standards – states under European-descended governments could
not be annexed as a rule – and because the United States would not have
permitted anything else.
 Other Extensions 57

Indeed, the essence of imperial political relations in this era, the stan-
dard practice, so to speak, can be regarded as forcing formally indepen-
dent polities to do the bidding of the imperial power or its agents, or better,
forcing them into a relationship where the imperial will is carried out
because matters have been so arranged that it appears to be perfectly natu-
ral and nothing else is conceivable. Historical perception of the imperial
climax has in a way been distorted because events in Africa, and tropical
Africa in particular, have featured so prominently in the foreground, cre-
ated a spectacle both at the time and for the history books, and culminated
in sovereignty being seized by a European power, usually Britain. The
quieter (though predatory enough) imperialism practised elsewhere around
the globe was much more typical – and more related to manifest economic
considerations.
If we disregard the settlement colonies and India, which had entered
the imperial orbit at an earlier period, the perfect dependencies were the
Latin American states, tied to primary production, punctiliously deliver-
ing to Britain supplies of foodstuffs and raw materials, serving as absorbers
of investment capital to the great profit of commodity traders and the City,
paying off their debts (sometimes with a measure of encouragement) and
requiring little or no intervention to ensure that their internal regimes
maintained the conditions which allowed these unequal relationships to
continue undisturbed.
The rulers of Latin America and Japan understood what was required of
them; those of China to a much lesser degree, and the scale of interven-
tion to secure European expectations was correspondingly greater. We can
see in the case of China, perhaps more than anywhere else, a direct and
visible link between the demands of merchants and financiers (and mis-
sionaries) and the action of governments. It is not unreasonable to con-
clude that this was the case because on the one hand the economic impor-
tance of China to the west was great and its potential believed to be even
greater; on the other, because of the authority that the regime continued to
maintain over its subjects, as long as it could be manipulated the amount
of European intervention required could be kept within limits acceptable
to their exchequers. The British position differed from that of its imperial
rivals only in so far as it was more concerned to maintain the integrity of
the ramshackle monarchy – Britain stood to lose most if it collapsed or
suffered partitioning. However, not least because of popular resistance to
European commercial penetration and the enormous cultural divide, the
situation in China, in contrast to that in South America, was inherently
unstable and constantly subject to the danger of elemental popular rebel-
lion aimed at expelling the foreigners.
58 Global Expansion

In Persia and the Arab world matters differed significantly and there
capital (until there appeared the prospect of profits from oil) showed a sig-
nal reluctance to risk its fortunes. On the contrary, the picture is one of
governments urging financiers, without great success, to commit them-
selves in that region. Without any doubt the concerns of the British state
were strategic ones, and the notion of any economic dimension appears
unsustainable. However, the concept of ‘strategic’ only begs the question
what is strategy about and what are strategic interests strategically defend-
ing?25
It is necessary instead to stand back and view the picture globally.
Smoothly functioning free-trade imperialism in South America and the
settlement colonies, tight control over the Egyptian economy and admin-
istration, a regime of unabashed colonial exploitation in India, loans to
and concessions wrung from the Chinese emperor, colonial war and con-
quest in Africa, together with the economic interactions which industria-
lised nations conducted within and between themselves, comprise a pro-
digiously complex interlocking structure involving states, empires, mighty
centres of population, migrant labourers and nomadic peoples in the fur-
thest corners of the earth, and amount in sum to a regime of accumulation
embracing the globe but with its centre in London.

Further Reading
P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion 1688–
1914, Longman, 1993.
E.W. Edwards, British Diplomacy and France in China 1895–1914, Clarendon, 1987.
Fullest examination of this theme.
C.C. Eldridge, Victorian Imperialism, Hodder & Stoughton, 1978.
V.G. Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969.
David McLean, Britain and her Buffer State: The Collapse of the Persian Empire 1890–
1914, Royal Historical Society, 1979. The only book-length analysis of this
development.
A.J. Stockwell (ed.), Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire, Cambridge
University Press, 1996.
4
The Evolved Imperial Structure

The British empire actually attained its widest geographical extent follow-
ing World War I and the victors’ decision to reward themselves with con-
fiscated German and Turkish possessions. It appeared briefly that the goals
of the epic struggle with Germany to dominate the global circuits of pro-
duction, trade and finance had been successfully accomplished; the in-
vestments in blood and treasure had paid off, so that, with the threatening
competitor overthrown, Britain now had an absolutely clear field and
business could continue as usual in both senses of the term. It was all the
more galling, therefore, to discover that the system itself had toppled into
a state of parlous collapse marked by permanent recession and slump and
that a new and even more threatening competitor had appeared in the
shape of the United States.
Even as the empire reached its zenith, its heyday was past, and histori-
cal perspective makes it clear that the height of combined size and influ-
ence was to be found in the brief phase before 1914 when the partition of
the globe had been completed and the struggle for repartition had not yet
descended into a desperate bloodbath. How, therefore, at its apogee was
the empire organised? How did the mechanisms which sustained it eco-
nomically, politically and culturally actually function?
At first sight the British empire of 1910 or thereabouts had no structure
at all but was instead a confused and bewildering jumble of self-governing
white-settled territories (the term ‘Dominions’ still lay in the future); colo-
nies with a variety of relationships to Westminster; protectorates of vari-
ous shapes, sizes and conditions (the key member of this group, Egypt, not
even being defined as such); and areas of greater or lesser informal influ-
ence – round the Kafkaesque paper maze in which politicians, bureaucrats
and diplomats scurried endlessly and often uncomprehendingly.

59
60 Global Expansion

The Economic Framework

Closer inspection, however, soon reveals a well-articulated structure, to

which formal constitutional niceties are largely, if not quite wholly, irrel-
evant. The empire was designed to fulfil certain clearly defined purposes.
In the first place it linked consumption and productive industry in Britain
with the wider world by ensuring a constant supply of imported foodstuffs
and raw materials upon which the population and the manufacturing pro-
cess depended absolutely. This it attained not only by including areas of
supply within the formal empire, for though important, that was second-
ary. What was primary was that the empire underpinned the regime of free
trade through which imports could be obtained anywhere on favourable
terms in exchange for British production.
British production, however, did not cover the full value of import de-
mand, indeed it had not done so since the eighteenth century. To balance
the permanent trade deficit which resulted and to show the overall profit
which was the starting point of yet further accumulation, the economy
relied upon ‘invisible earnings’, from shipping, agency, banking and in-
surance services, and increasingly, as the nineteenth century progressed,
investment income. The global network of trade and investment, the joint
creation not only of Britain but all the developed states1 formed the soil
on which the invisible profits grew, but the empire and the navy which
guarded it was well understood to be the guarantee of British capital’s privi-
leged access to its cultivation. Possibly, it was thought, it might even guar-
antee the network’s existence, for should Britain’s stewardship be removed
the intricate mechanism might well be disrupted in a ferocious contest for
dominance among powers who had less than centuries experience of these
matters.
British global power, both financial and military, therefore extended the
late nineteenth century regime of accumulation to parts of the world where
it was hitherto unknown or rudimentary; it guarded its continuance once
in place and it perpetuated a structured market in which the citizens of any
civilised or would-be-civilised nation were welcome to compete but in
which the British had a built-in advantage. Other states were no less con-
scious of the relationship and as the century wore on began to resort to tar-
iffs and protectionist measures in an endeavour to redress some of the bal-
ance; not only countries such as Germany whose rulers aspired ultimately
to take Britain’s place, but also those who had lost hope of doing so, such as
France, and those not yet ready to enter the contest, like the United States.
An additional motivation might therefore occur during this period to
induce annexation of a tract of territory with commercial potential which
 The Evolved Imperial Structure 61

was in danger of being absorbed by a protectionist state and thereby ceas-

ing to be a site of British enterprise, if circumstances suggested that was the
only recourse to keep it out of protectionist hands – especially if strategic
or missionary concerns could also be plausibly argued. The central prin-
ciple observed in Westminster, however, remained one of minimal inter-
ference. The settlement colonies were safely within the sphere of capital-
ist relations and free trade, so far as capital flows (if not material goods)
were concerned – then allow them all the political autonomy they de-
manded. The Japanese were progressing in the right direction faster than
anyone would have imagined to be possible – then sustain them with ap-
plause, encouragement and diplomatic blessing. The Chinese state was a
lot shakier, but a good borrower and the most likely polity for preserving
the open door and the British investment – the keep a close eye on it, but
do whatever might be possible by loan and agreement with other powers
to preserve its integrity. The Egyptians regrettably could not be trusted on
their own to uphold their responsibilities for debt repayment and the pro-
tection of the Suez Canal, so unfortunately it was necessary to teach them
a short military lesson and subject them to political and military supervi-
sion, but their puppet monarch should still be responsible for the tax col-
lection and local administration. Private enterprise could be left to the
conquest of the ‘savages’ (but likely future customers and labourers) of
northern Nigeria or the Rhodesias. Even with the obstinately obdurate,
such as Boer intransigents, once they were made to yield to the decisive
argument of the imperial forces and see sense on the vital issue of unim-
peded capital operations, an extensive measure of self-government could
be tolerated.
All this is not to argue, as certain historians have done, that the British
state and individual administrations of the 1870–1914 period were disin-
clined to an imperial stance and only very reluctantly expanded the di-
mensions of the British empire. On the contrary, their disposition was
actively and aggressively imperial. What they preferred to avoid if pos-
sible was certain more expensive forms of imperial relationship2 – thought
they did not hesitate to assume them if the preferred alternatives were
unavailable. The formal empire then must be viewed as simply one instru-
ment among others or one element of a system whose purpose was the
extraction of a global surplus. The multiplicity of formal relations between
the ‘mother country’ and the diverse and variegated bits and pieces of the
structure have to be viewed primarily as ad hoc and pragmatic responses
to the necessity in the different instances to devise a cheap and efficient
machinery to institute and protect surplus extraction.
62 Global Expansion

Settlement Colonies

In the settlement colonies the labour power of British-descended males

was relatively scarce and consequently, by the standards of the nineteenth
century, highly paid. That, of course, was the source of attraction to emi-
grants. Conditions of employment might still be very harsh and exact-
ing – the life of a Canadian logger or fisherman, of a South African gold
miner or of an Australian stockman was certainly no bed of roses. In the
case of Canada the surviving and dispossessed aboriginal population was
little drawn upon as a labour resource, but that was far from being the case
in Australia3 – which before 1900 consisted of a number of separate colo-
nies – or New Zealand. On the Australian sheep stations minimally re-
warded aboriginal labour in all sorts of capacities, some requiring advanced
levels of skill, formed a routine component of the workforce. Their pay-
ment could be depressed below even basic subsistence because of the links
they maintained with kin still outside the market economy, whose sup-
port covered the difference. By contrast with North America or Australia,
the conquest of New Zealand left the indigenous Maoris a comparatively
high percentage of the resulting population. A Polynesian-descended people
with an already advanced culture by the time of the European arrival, they
were rapidly integrated into the market economy and the labour market.
Maoris toiled on farms, in the construction industry, in the docks and on
the railways, forming a pool of cheaper labour, excluded from higher-paid
occupations and fomenting sectional divisions in the workforce.
The South African case was, however, unique and in a class of its own.
The Dutch farmers of the eighteenth century had openly practised agri-
cultural slavery, using captive members of the African population as its
victims. Among the principal reasons for the establishment of the Boer
republics in the first half of the nineteenth century had been the abolition
of legal slavery throughout the British empire in 1832, with the Boers
endeavouring as a consequence to escape from British authority at the Cape
and perpetuate their system in a location further north. The mineral dis-
coveries in the later part of the century transformed the labour market, as
so much else in South African life. Operations in both diamond and gold
mines were absolutely dependent on a plentiful supply of African labour
in the most menial and dangerous of tasks – it was a resource without which
the mines could not have functioned.
While the mining corporations were indifferent in principle as to what
colour of skin did which work, and would have been only too pleased to
reduce the excessive rewards of white skilled labour by means of black
competition, nonetheless it was in their interest to keep African labour-
 The Evolved Imperial Structure 63

power cheap by compelling the labourers as far as possible to retain a rural

connection and especially to keep their families there, surviving on sub-
sistence agriculture, so that the wage costs of an adult male worker did not
have to cover the indefinite maintainance of his family as well – in other
words to impose upon them the status of migrant workers and deny them
residence rights in the mining areas. It was a point of view which coin-
cided nicely with that of the authorities, no less anxious to avert the devel-
opment of an established black proletariat around the main concentrations
of population within their states. Compelled by poverty and overcrowd-
ing in the rural areas to which they they were confined to seek paid em-
ployment in the mines and accept the erosion of the indigenous social fab-
ric which it occasioned, the black labour force was herded in off-duty hours
into vile and insanitary compounds where its members were then unavoid-
ably the victims of violence, petty crime, adulterated provisions and traf-
fickers in the low-grade alcohol which afforded them transient release from
their miseries at the same time as contributing mightily to the violence and
disorder. It was a repetition of all the worst features characteristic of early
industrialisation in Europe or North America, infinitely worsened by the
addition of unconstrained racial oppression and cruelty.
Still it was not enough. The Rand mines, producing at full capacity after
the tiresome restrictions of the Transvaal government had been removed
by the Boer War, had become yet more centrally important to a world fi-
nancial system established upon the gold standard. Output expanded and
the demand for labour grew insatiable beyond even the capacity of im-
poverished African villages to supply. The answer was sought in inden-
tured Chinese labour, ‘coolies’ signed up into effective slavery for a speci-
fied period of years, shipped to South Africa and confined in even fouler
conditions than their African counterparts. The mineowners wanted to
recruit 100,000; two years after getting authorisation from the British gov-
ernment they had nearly 50,000, creating what one historian indicted as
‘moral sinks of indescribable human beastliness’4 before the trade was
stopped by the incoming Liberal administration of 1906. Most of these
contract slaves were eventually repatriated, although a significant Chi-
nese community was left behind in South Africa; in later decades to be-
come victims of apartheid legislation. The import into South Africa of ra-
cially stigmatised labour was not confined to the Chinese: Indians were
also brought in, not in this case to the mines but mainly to work the sugar
plantations of Natal, to work for pay and conditions which no white im-
migrant would suffer and for which an African workforce could not be
found; subsequently they gave rise to a large and politically important
community.
64 Global Expansion

Other Areas

The surplus extracted from the formal and informal empire, with a few
though important exceptions such as South African minerals, rested over-
whelmingly, either directly or in the last analysis, upon agriculture.5 This
was true even of the profits derived from transport systems, for in the main
it was agricultural products or raw materials which were shipped; or those
from imposed indemnity or borrowing by non-European rulers, for it was
on the backs of peasant taxpayers that the repayments were loaded as a rule.6
In a few instances it might be those of miners of silver, copper, sulphur, coal
or other minerals – and in the twentieth century Azerbaijani or Iranian oil
workers. From these latter enterprises European investors profited twice over,
firstly by the dividends realised on the sale of their product and secondly
from the taxes they generated, used to meet repayments on the loan agree-
ments entered into by local rulers – the loans in turn normally being used
for the purchase of European-produced goods and services.
As noted above, the British government, which assumed an overall re-
sponsibility for policing the global system,7 preferred to leave the collec-
tion of these revenues in the hands of the local tyrant, with or without
supervision. In relation to the Latin American states it did not really have
any choice in the matter: to have declared a formal protectorate over hither-
to independent Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking nations would have
been regarded as unacceptable by the standards of nineteenth century in-
ternational relations. That did not, of course, preclude a great deal of inter-
ference in their internal politics, visits by gunboats or demands for con-
trol over their customs when the debt was defaulted upon. In the end,
however, it was naturally the peon, sharecropper or seasonal agricultural
labourer or the miner who paid, directly or indirectly in terms of starva-
tion income, squalor, ignorance, disease and truncated lifespan.
Operation of the system at one remove remained true even in a third of
India, for in the case of the ‘Princely States’ such petty autocrats, though
subject to British suzerainty, were left with internal autonomy to misgov-
ern their subjects along traditional quasi-feudal lines. Among the meth-
ods of raising finance resorted to by the British government in India was
the imposition of a salt tax, which compelled consumers to purchase salt
only from a government-leased monopoly and prohibited them from ob-
taining this necessity anywhere else, such as the sea in the case of coastal
communities – the repetition of a taxation practice which had famously
contributed to the downfall of the French Bourbons in 1789.
Apart from loans to the Indian government, to princely rulers and rail-
way investment, British enterprise in the subcontinent financed various
 The Evolved Imperial Structure 65

forms of production, principally, though not entirely, agricultural.8 The

two most favoured cash crops were indigo, the basis of an important range
of dyestuffs, and tea, which from the 1870s began increasingly to displace
the Chinese product in British teacups. The labour force on these planta-
tions was largely composed of women and children, recruited from over-
taxed and poverty-stricken villages pleased to be offered any source of
additional income, transported to the plantations virtually as indentured
labour and obliged to work there in the most abject and appalling condi-
tions. In the case of China, although this country, outside Hong Kong and,
to a degree, the Treaty Ports, was never under direct British control, the
demand for revenues to meet debt and indemnity obligations, as well as a
rising demand for Chinese products on the world market, transmitted
themselves to the basic producers, with further deterioration in the in-
comes and conditions of already hard-pressed rice growers, tea-pickers and
domestic silk producers. As with India, for most of the population there
were no reserves, and it only required the slightest failure in rainfall, or
any adverse weather conditions, to trigger the onset of devastating fam-
ines.
Egypt constitutes the clearest example of what was effectively a colony
under military occupation but not acknowledged as such. On paper it re-
mained a province of the Turkish sultan, subject to the authority of his
representative the Khedive, who conducted the country’s affairs with the
assistance of British soldiers and officials. The Khedive’s administration
was by no means an ornament, Cromer, the real ruler of Egypt, worked
through it. The first responsibility of that administration was to preserve
the civil order which enabled the holders of Egyptian bonds to be paid,
the second to collect the revenues which actually paid them. In the end
the growing pressure was felt by the fellahin, the Egyptian peasantry, a fact
recognised even by contemporary comment in Britain. The fertility of the
Nile valley poured its tribute into the banks and discount houses of Lon-
don.
It wasn’t only the exactions of the landlord and the attentions of the tax
collector that the luckless peasants were compelled to endure. Disregard-
ing the technicalities of the status afforded to them by their presence in
the country, the officer class of the British forces stationed there treated it
simply as a conquered colony whose inhabitants existed for no other pur-
pose than to serve their whims. A typical outcome was the ‘Denshawni
Horror’ of 1906 indicted in the British press by George Bernard Shaw. A
group of officers had gone out shooting in the delta and proceeded to shoot
the domesticated pigeons belonging to the peasants of one of its villages,
birds which the Egyptians kept as a species of poultry. When the indig-
66 Global Expansion

nant villagers, their pleas ignored, finally remonstrated with sticks, sev-
eral, including an elderly man, were hung for their impertinence and oth-
ers condemned to penal servitude for life.
Where the colonial (or ‘protectorate’) relationship was open and offi-
cial, as was the case with most of the late nineteenth-century African
acquisitions, whether under Westminster or a chartered company, the prin-
cipal concern of government was to recover from the colony the basic
costs of conquest and administration and to integrate it as quickly as pos-
sible into the world regime of production and accumulation on terms which
favoured British capital in an implicit but not ostensible manner.

Techniques

The first aspect, recovery of conquest and administration costs, required

the extraction of cheap or free labour from the Africans. In some cases,
where other devices failed, straightforward coercion and forced labour was
resorted to: chiefs would be instructed to supply an allocation of their
young men for work in road-laying, building or as carriers. However, this
was not a favoured technique – it provoked particular resentment and might
give rise to unfavourable publicity back in Britain. The preferred method
was to impose taxation. In what had been non-monetary economies and
where little opportunity existed for steady exchange relations between the
conquerors and their new subjects, the only way left available to earn the
cash needed to meet the taxation demands was to enter paid employment
either with the imposed public authority or else incoming missionary or
private employers – on whatever terms they were prepared to offer, which
were certainly likely to be less than subsistence.
The approach to the second aspect – economic integration – was likely
to differ considerably depending on the geography and climate of the
newly acquired colony. In eastern and south-central Africa the subsistence
cultivation and cattle herding typical of the peoples of that area were not
well designed to yield a surplus easily capable of being turned into com-
mercial profit. At the same time, however, they contained temperate re-
gions to which European settlers could hopefully be attracted and com-
mercial agriculture and cash crops developed. It was, of course, necessary
to evict the Africans already on the ground, confine them to the more in-
fertile and unproductive lands and then, when they found these too mea-
gre for their support, hire them cheaply as agricultural labour. Thus the
privileged white farms of Southern Rhodesia came into existence. The
participants in Rhodes’s invasion force which raised the flag over Fort
Salisbury were all rewarded, for example, with extensive acres and the
 The Evolved Imperial Structure 67

promise of more. Thus, too, appeared the exclusive ‘White Highlands’ of

Kenya, where Africans were altogether prohibited from practising their
own agriculture. If possible this was an even more scandalous proceeding
than the Rhodesian example, in that the ‘legal’ basis for the acquisition
was local treaty rather than conquest, so that breach of trust was practised
here as well as robbery with violence.
West Africa represented a very different state of affairs in view of a cli-
mate which made significant European settlement an unthinkable propo-
sition. It implied an on the whole somewhat less ferocious colonial re-
gime and an entirely different mode of surplus extraction and economic
integration. On the Niger, particularly its delta, the cash crop of palm oil
had been substantially developed even before the onset of the colonial
era. There were no large plantations. The production of the oil nut was in
the hands of African peasant farmers and the surplus was extracted from
them by the Royal Niger Company and the smaller trading enterprises
through price differentials. The farmers had to endure additional rake-offs
from taxation and protection payments to local bigwigs, but compared to
their counterparts in Egypt or eastern Africa their situation was a relatively
fortunate one. A very similar set-up prevailed in the southern part of the
Gold Coast, the future Ghana, only here the crop in question was cocoa
beans rather than palm oil.
The West African economic environment did not provide enormous
scope for investment compared with other parts of the colonial or semi-
colonial world. There were no weak governments in the style of the Chi-
nese or Latin American to be force-fed with increasingly oppressive loans.
Scope for extending the acreage of oil nuts or cocoa beans was limited:
some investment was possible in the processing machinery, particularly
of the former, but beyond a certain point an enterprise like the Niger Com-
pany had to diversify in order to achieve growth. Banking was an attrac-
tive option and investment in the administrative infrastructure was a pos-
sibility, but not likely in this case to be a source of enormous profits. British
West Africa, though not without its economic attractions, failed to pro-
vide the opportunity for the sort of returns capable of being realised in
central and South Africa, and even more so in Egypt, which was not even
a formal colony. The reason is clear – particular conditions made it less
practicable to squeeze the basic producers in the manner which could be
more readily undertaken in thickly crowded Egypt, temperate South Af-
rica or the grasslands of the east and centre.9
68 Global Expansion

Ethnic Diasporas

The institution of long-range migrant contract labour has already been

noted. Its importance cannot be overemphasised and it was intrinsic, by
the levelling out particular and immediate labour shortages, to making the
empire a working and profitable proposition. It would have made it more
profitable still but for the social and political resistance developed against
it – and with distinct racist overtones – by white labour in Australasia.
Nevertheless, Chinese workers did appear in the sugar plantations of tropi-
cal Australia to do work for which whites could not be recruited. The
Malayan rubber plantations were another enterprise which led to the
appearance of an alien Chinese community in a British colony because a
suitable local labour force could not be recruited, and of course its mem-
bers did not remain confined to the plantations.
The Chinese were not recruited from a British colony, but the ease with
which they could be hired compared with, for example, Japanese, is in-
dicative of the conditions prevailing in China, both as a measure of the
desperate poverty which could bring so many to sell themselves into vir-
tual slavery, and the loss of control over or disregard for its own subjects
by the Peking government. India, which was a British colony, constituted
the other principal source of migrant workforces, and if to this is added
the rank and file of the Indian army, the contribution to imperial security
and prosperity of these uprooted individuals is incalculable.
Indian migrant labour was shifted even further afield than Chinese. It is
to be expected that large numbers would appear on the opposite side of the
Indian Ocean, in South Africa, particularly Natal, where sugar plantations
required labour. In the words of one authority, ‘the sugar planters ... found
that Native labour lacked the stability and persistence that sugar planting
required’10 – and although they tried they could not induce the authorities
to institute forced labour for the Africans. The case of Kenya was a little
more complicated. Indentured labourers – 32,000 of them – were imported
in the 1890s to construct the railway to Uganda, but these were swiftly
expelled again following its completion, and the ancestors of the subse-
quent Indian community were enticed on their own initiative, coming
over to serve in the areas of petty trade and domestic employment. Indi-
ans as well as Chinese were shipped to northern Australia as indentured
labour on the sugar plantations in these places,11 and when this neo-slave
trade was at its peak, even as far as South America. Sugar cane in the West
Indies was worked with African-descended labour as it had initially been
in British Guiana, the colony on the South American mainland, but when
the opportunity arose, the African workforce was deliberately replaced in
 The Evolved Imperial Structure 69

the late nineteenth century for the same reason as the Natal planters sought
Indian labour: it was regarded as being both more diligent and more con-
trollable – for in the larger West Indian colonies freed slaves had taken
advantage of available land to leave the plantations and set up as petty
farmers on their own account. Overall, throughout the empire the num-
bers involved were enormous. An outstanding case was Malaya, where
between 1880 and 1911 Chinese and Indian immigration changed the
balance of population from 80 per cent indigenous Malay to 51 per cent.
Another area in which the overall imperial economy could scarcely have
functioned without Chinese and Indian labour was in long-haul merchant
shipping where Chinese and Indian crew members were universal – natu-
rally being confined to the most menial and worst-paid functions on ship.
Even the South Pacific islands, not having much in the way of material
resources to exploit (though there were some sugar and copra plantations
on the larger islands) could not escape having to make their contribution
to the labour tribute. For a time the usual procedure was simply to kidnap
these kanaks and take them away under duress, again mainly for the con-
venience of the north Australian sugar growers; later contract labour be-
came the norm, which had the advantage of preventing the victims be-
coming permanently resident if the employers and the authorities wanted
to insist on repatriating them at the end of the contract, which in Australia
they always did.
On every continent and upon the oceans connecting them productive
energies were exercised in an incalculable variety of functions by a med-
ley of workforces, the majority of whom, excepting the favoured racial
elite, toiled in atrocious conditions upon the margins of subsistence. Their
output coalesced into a system of global exchange structured by a formally
unregulated world market with intrinsic advantage located in western
Europe, the United States and the settlement colonies. On top of that was
erected a gold – i.e. sterling regulated – system of multilateral exchanges
and financial structure of staggering complexity, the net effect of which
was to give ultimate title of ownership of a very large part of the structure
– and the claims to income derived from that ownership – to interests lo-
cated principally in the City of London. The formal empire was a part, and
possibly not the most important part, of that complex, a historic accretion
of territories brought under direct British ownership for a chain of contin-
gent reasons stretching back to the seventeenth century when the English
ruling class first set out to dominate the world economy. Once in exist-
ence, however, particularly in conditions of intensifying national and
international friction, it was soon to acquire a political, social and ideo-
logical momentum of its own.
70 Global Expansion

Power and Arms

Titles to ownership, however, are not of much value unless they can be
enforced – as investors in Russia discovered after 1917 – and enforcement
was a central purpose, indeed it might be claimed the central purpose of
the imperial structure. It was not so much the enforcement of each and
every particular title that was paramount as the maintenance of the over-
all structure through which claims and titles were enabled to function.
Other European powers, even when engaged in colonial rivalry, could
usually be relied upon to respect a property title,12 but the uncivilised, like
the unwashed at home, might endanger them at any time by revolt or
anarchical conduct. ‘Civilised’ powers – generally France or Russia – might
threaten to exclude British interests from particular slices of territory yet
unclaimed, or in due course, in the case of Germany, appear to menace
British ascendency over the global system.
A military machine of unparalleled scope existed to avert such dangers
from whatever quarter, much of it paid for and staffed by the colonial sub-
jects themselves. By continental standards the British professional army
was tiny and specifically designed for holding colonial populations in
subjection.13 British governments preferred to use it in only the most spar-
ing and niggardly fashion and with the onset of the South African war
recruiting campaigns had immediately to be put in hand to supplement it
with volunteers. Most of the army was stationed in India, partly to over-
awe the subject peoples and discourage any inclination to revolt on the
part of these overwhelmingly numerically superior masses;14 partly in view
of suspected Russian intentions on the northern frontiers.15 To provide
the British rulers with a land army comparable to the conscripted forces of
other powers, Indian recruits were relied upon and were centrally placed
for use in the subcontinent itself, Africa, the Middle East or eastern Asia.
The expenses came out of the budget of the government of India and the
financial burdens were sustained by the Indian taxpayer.
Co-ordinating with the Indian army, and of even greater importance in
asserting the British world hegemony, was the Royal Navy. Since the sev-
enteenth century superior seapower had been the foundation of the
country’s imperial strength. It protected all the critical trade routes con-
necting Britain from interruption, but could easily cut enemy ones; it threat-
ened unchallengable blockade against any European or other enemy, while
safeguarding the shipment of troops; if necessary it could be used to bom-
bard recalcitrant seaports and coastlines. Only once, briefly during the
nineteenth century when steam-driven ironclad rendered obsolete all the
nations’ wooden navies, had that awesome superiority seemed in any jeop-
 The Evolved Imperial Structure 71

ardy, but it did not take the British long to establish an unbeatable lead in
iron as formerly in wooden warships. Although the self-perception of the
British public was that their state, without military conscription, was pa-
cific in outlook and, unlike its German or even French rivals, abhorred
militarism, in reality British taxpayers paid two and a half times as much
for defence as their French or German counterparts.
A further implication of Britain’s hegemonic position on the oceans was
that all lesser overseas empires, French, German, Dutch or Portuguese,
continued only on British sufferance. It was a point too obvious to require
emphasising and embodied in the conception of the ‘two-power standard’,
the doctrine which stipulated that the British navy must be bigger and
stronger than the next two most powerful navies combined. As we shall
see, it was the determination of the German ruling class to challenge this
relationship which marked an important milestone on the road to the clash
of empires in 1914.

‘Regions Caesar Never Knew’: Empire and Ideology

This particular theme is so boundless – like the empire itself – that ideally
it requires a further volume to itself. What is striking is the speed with
which imperial ideology colonised the public discourse and corrupted the
civic culture.
In one aspect it represented a continuation and extension of the national
chauvinism, peculiarly English but capable of drawing the differently in-
flected Scottish culture into its orbit, that had been nurtured for centuries
as a means of cementing together the gaping social rifts that separated the
privileged from the less privileged, and they again from the ‘swinish mul-
titude’. It was a form of consciousness perfected during the revolutionary
and Napoleonic wars and one that had performed sterling service against
English and Scottish Jacobins – stigmatised as tools of the national enemy –
reformers, Owenites and Chartists. The imperial ideologues of the 1870s
onwards were drawing their raw material from a deeply poisoned well, and
more immediately they were elaborating themes which Lord Palmerston
had exploited with devastating effect from the 1840s to the 1860s in en-
hancing his political career.
A pre-existing arrogant conviction of national superiority and of the
world-policing role embodied in the British navy, concentrated no doubt
in the middle classes but running through all social strata, formed the
bedrock upon which the edifice of late nineteenth-century imperialist
consciousness was erected. When world economic and political develop-
ments placed on the agenda the issue of dividing up the spaces on the map
72 Global Expansion

not hitherto subject to close European control, it was easy enough, through
the media of the time, to gain public acceptance of British claims, demands
and actions as a natural extension of the national moral superiority al-
ready responsible for Britain’s world lead in industrial output, trade or naval
power – the country’s particular manifestation of manifest destiny.

Moral Self-congratulation

It scarcely required official initiatives by the imperial power to establish a

climate of moral superiority in British popular sentiment, a climate that
intensified during the century’s closing decades. It found expression
through the press, popular entertainments, Sunday sermons, political dis-
course, the schoolroom, children’s literature. In presenting the British
empire as a humanitarian institution the examples of revered missionar-
ies such as David Livingstone were strenuously evoked; and the suppres-
sion in British India in the early nineteenth century of the form of human
sacrifice termed sati (suttee), the practice in Hindu culture of burning wid-
ows alive,16 and other morally unacceptable traditions, was a mighty source
of self-congratulation – though on the other hand British rule in India may
actually have strengthened the caste system, by adopting uncritically the
Brahmin interpretation of Hindu law and putting the force of the colonial
power behind it. The British state had also taken the lead, first in formally
outlawing the Atlantic slave trade by international treaty in 1807, and then
slavery itself throughout its domains in 1832.17
Britain, which had been in its time the most energetic practitioner of
slave trading, became in the nineteenth century the most zealous of all
states in its suppression, and even maintained a West African squadron to
catch foreign vessels illicitly plying the trade and naturally awarded itself
enormous moral credit for its actions. The motives for this reversal are still
disputed.18 Evidently it would not have happened had West Indian slavery
continued to be regarded as vital to the Atlantic economy but given that
condition there is no need to question the sincerity of the abolitionists’
intentions. Anti-slavery became part of the British official mind and the
consequences were far-reaching.
On the Atlantic the British Navy energetically pursued slave traders all
along the coast of tropical Africa. Humanitarianism was combined with
the practical necessity of not allowing French, Spanish or Portuguese colo-
nies in the Americas to gain a competitive edge by continuing to import
slaves. The Sierra Leone colony was established to accommodate slaves
freed on the high seas. The Niger delta had been the principal source of
supply for the Liverpool slavers. Once the trade was banned the firms in-
 The Evolved Imperial Structure 73

volved did not give up. ‘Legitimate’ commodities were sought to replace it
and a profitable one was found in palm oil, which in the later nineteenth
century became the basis for most British-produced soap. Thus was the
nucleus established of the later Nigerian colony. Interestingly, the British
administration there (it took over in 1900 from the chartered Royal Niger
Company) was willing to tolerate continued domestic slavery as practised
by its more powerful African subjects. In East Africa the results of anti-
slavery beliefs and actions were if anything more historically consequen-
tial, for by the treaty of 1872 between Bartle Frere and the Sultan of Zanzi-
bar, this outlook had been responsible for beginning the process which
brought the area of Kenya, the Lakes and the Nile headwaters under Brit-
ish control.
The conviction that the British empire corresponded more to the idea of
a natural phenomenon than a political construct was instiled early in the
impressionable consciousness, with the object that was probably the most
vivid and colourful feature of the elementary schoolroom – the wall map
with the British-owned portions of the world portrayed in brilliant red.
The instruction continued with children’s and adolescents’ imaginative
literature, especially that intended for boys, where the exploitation of
imperial themes in juvenile fiction, both magazine and book form, was
wholly relentless.19 The empire after all supplied an endless theatre for
adventure and excitement: perceptions which were ultimately institutiona-
lised in the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides movements, organisations founded
by a colonial general and hero of the South African War, and the activities
and rituals of which, particularly the Scouts, took for granted an imperial
context. At the other end of the social scale the public schools became
virtually interlocked with the empire, advanced from the purpose of
homogenising a political and social elite out of the divergent components
of the English ruling class to one of training that class to govern an em-
pire.

The Media

The development of the mainstream traditional press during the last third
of the century is both instructive and depressing. Whether we are dealing
with the London dailies or the major provincial newspapers, the trend is
similar. In the 1870s the expressed editorial attitude towards the minor
instances of territorial expansion which occurred in that decade is one of
caution and reserve. Notions occasionally expressed in favour of an ag-
gressive imperial policy, such at that of Bartle Frere, are reported in a scep-
tical and ironic mode. By the late 1890s these same journals were gloat-
74 Global Expansion

ingly rejoicing over if Conservative, or accepting in more measured terms

if Liberal, the mass slaughter of Sudanese dervishes. The word ‘jingo’ was
coined in the 1870s. It has been pointed out that publishers and publicists,
least of all those aiming at a juvenile market, were not dragooned into
celebrating imperial themes, but acted for commercial motives. Exactly
so. They knew what would sell and responded to the market.
The advent of the popular daily press in the 1890s added a new dimen-
sion to the cultivation of chauvinist and imperialist attitudes: these publi-
cations did not even make a pretence of arguing the benefits of empire but
asserted with strident dogmatism the virtues of imperial conquest and
rule20 and the intrinsic connection between patriotism, empire and the
Conservative Party.21 Rudyard Kipling, Nobel laureate for literature, pro-
claimed the same sentiments in verse and somewhat more elevated style.22
The Celtic warrior-queen Boudicca could by hymned (though not by
Kipling) as a forerunner of Britain’s imperial glory, the poet using her as a
pretext for noting the restricted compass of the ancient Roman empire
compared with the British present-day one,23 and of course a fanciful statue
was erected to her in the heart of London. Empire exhibitions combined
entertainment with instruction in the multifarious lands under the Brit-
ish flag. The jubilees to celebrate the 50th and 60th anniversaries of Queen
Victoria’s accession were designed, especially that of 1897, no less as cel-
ebrations of imperial achievement, with cohorts of subjects of every colour
fetched from all around the world to make up a procession in the capital
and which resembled – perhaps deliberately – the triumph of a Roman
emperor, as well as creating a lively market in souvenirs.
The public rhetoric used to validate imperialism and imperial expan-
sionism both drew on the past and added some late nineteenth century
refinements. Supposed material benefits were not ignored, and the assump-
tion was industriously promoted in press and educational materials that
imperial links improved access to the range of imports on which the Brit-
ish public was dependent. Whether this was actually the case was not likely
to be dispassionately investigated – least of all in the popular media. It was
likewise not difficult to argue that the densely populated but geographi-
cally restricted offshore island was able to lead the world only because its
bounds were extended so enormously across the globe. Neither of these
assumptions was altogether vacuous, although both mistook the glitter for
the substance and a financial relationship for a political one. Permeating
the public consciousness, however, and voiced with growing stridency,
were more philosophic justifications for empire.
 The Evolved Imperial Structure 75

Attitudes

These justification may be defined as the peculiar ability of Britons to gov-

ern inferior races; the associated notions of ‘civilising mission’24 and
progress; and the increasingly touted myth of social Darwinism, itself a
product of intensifying international, imperial and social struggles.
So far as the first of these was concerned, the British state had acquired
lengthy practice in India and the Caribbean and there had been plenty of
time for attitudes of innate superiority cultivated among colonial admin-
istrators and soldiers to seep down among the general public. Back in the
1830s the historian Macaulay, commissioned to lay out the design for the
Indian civil service, insisted that it should be cut to an English template.25
He was later to gloat, as did the historian and prophet of empire, J. A.
Froude, over the suppression of the Mutiny and consequent atrocities.
Leading literary figures such as Carlyle and Dickens were no less enthu-
siastic to applaud the savagery with which the Jamaica insurrection was
put down in 1864.26 Britain, it must be remembered, of the major Euro-
pean powers, had been far more involved than any other in the slave trade,
and in India ruled colonial subjects on a scale enormously beyond any
other colonising state. With technological advance and social reform
during the nineteenth century came the idea of progress, and when this
was yoked to a pre-existing assumption of ethnic superiority, the idea of
a people uniquely qualified to bring forceful order, enlightenment and
civilisation to barbarians and savages around the globe did not take long
to follow.

the Indian canal system could technically have been built at almost any
period of known history.What the British added was above all the power
of a unified and authoritarian state which acted because it saw the dan-
ger of drought and famine to its rule.27

The same author notes that institutions such as the British Museum,
Natural History Museum, Science Museum and Kew Gardens were not
only temples of knowledge but ‘memorials to British expansion and ac-
quisitiveness’, displaying not only knowledge but ‘the confident capacity
to control it’.
The British, however, could and did congratulate themselves upon treat-
ing the inhabitants of their colonial possessions more humanely than
sadistic Latins like the Portuguese or French, the iron-hearted Germans or
Boers, or the especially notorious regime of King Leopold’s Congo. Kipling,
as always, was on hand to draw the moral, insisting that the sole concern
76 Global Expansion

of the British administrator in India was with the welfare of his charges: if
matters went well this paragon happily stood back to let the Indians take
the credit, if they turned out badly he manfully stepped forward to shoul-
der the blame.
It was a standpoint which, regardless of its shortcomings, at least pre-
tended to concern itself with the welfare and ultimate advancement of the
colonised and so was logically incompatible with social Darwinism – the
doctrine that races (or nations, or classes) were locked in a zoological
struggle for survival or dominance, that the least fit would rightfully suffer
extermination28 and that the coloured ones would serve the white in per-
petuity without any nonsense about eventually fitting the former to par-
ticipate in European civilisation. Logical contradiction did not, of course,
prevent both notions being adhered to simultaneously by imperial publi-
cists. In the early twentieth century, as international tensions sharpened
and the powers geared up to settle their differences by all-out conflict, the
Darwinian interpretation of how the empire should function on behalf of
Britain and the settlement colonies began to assume growing prominence
in the minds and speeches of leading imperialists.

‘Oldest Colony’

The ideology of empire was baleful in every respect, and came home to
torment the United Kingdom, with gruesome long-term effects. Between
the 1880s and the onset of World War I (and thereafter), the politics of
‘Britain’s oldest colony’, Ireland, were a major destabilising feature in the
British political system and constitutional structure, as well as a focus and
rallying issue for all the most sinister and reactionary elements in state
and society. By 1914 the tensions generated around it looked capable of
precipitating civil war.
During the 1870s, underground agrarian violence directed at landlords,
memories of famine and revolt, embittered consciousness of centuries of
English misgovernment and religious discrimination coalesced, when it
became possible to express them in the conditions of franchise extension
and secret ballot after 1870, into a political demand for limited self-gov-
ernment – Home Rule – expressed through the eighty or so Irish MPs
elected to the Westminster parliament. Violent opposition came from all
the forces of the traditional English ascendancy, landlords, officialdom,
military, and from the Protestant masses of the north-east, centred on the
manufacturing and shipbuilding city of Belfast.
The dispute occasioned a split in the Liberal Party, resulting in twenty
years of nearly uninterrupted Conservative government and the defection
 The Evolved Imperial Structure 77

of an important section of the peerage and of hitherto Liberal industrial-

ists and opinion-formers to the Tory ranks.29 The Conservatives adopted
intransigent opposition to Home Rule, along with support for imperial-
ism, as their banner and indeed renamed themselves the Conservative and
Unionist Party. Seen only from a British perspective the matter was cer-
tainly significant enough, and foreshadowed an armed confrontation and
possible civil war if the dispute could not be resolved by constitutional
methods – which by 1913 looked likely to be the case, as rival armed para-
military formations were being organised by the opposing sides in Ire-
land.30 The purely British perspective, however, is not enough. Why, it
may be asked, should the Conservatives and their allies so totally identify
themselves with the Ulster minority, expect that identification to find a
favourable response among the mainland public, and be prepared to go to
the brink on behalf of this sectarian minority interest?
Class solidarity between the ruling elites in both islands was no doubt
part of the story, but Home Rule did not really threaten the propertied
Unionist intransigents in any very material way and certainly not to the
extent that it became a choice between civil war and class liquidation.
Again, it is pertinent to note that the Conservatives began to view Union-
ism as the only instrument left to them for regaining power following the
shattering electoral defeats of 1906 and 1910, but the question persists as
to why they found it profitable to treat the matter in such a fashion.
The answer can be found in imperialist ideology, both at an elite and
popular level. Asquith’s Liberal ministers, no less imperialist in practical
terms than their parliamentary opponents, were perfectly aware that Home
Rule posed no threat whatever to vital imperial interests, regarded it as a
distraction and did not hide their impatience with the fact that they were
forced to address it only because they were, after 1910, dependent on the
Home Rule MPs for their parliamentary majority. Where the difference
lay was that the Conservatives, while happy to exploit imperialist senti-
ment in a wholly cynical manner whenever it suited them, were never-
theless emotionally committed to it in a manner different from the Liber-
als. That sentiment was the strap which held together Tory grandees, Ulster
Unionist politicians, army and navy officers, Orange hooligans and the
Conservative rank-and-file. Home Rule, while it would have conferred
on a Dublin parliament fewer powers than those enjoyed by its Canadian,
Australian or New Zealand equivalents, represented an intolerable sym-
bolic rupture of the unity in the imperial heartland itself; the more so as
control of that parliament would surely fall to elements whose loyalty to
the imperial ideal was less than sacrosanct and whose acceptance of the
British connection was grudging at best.
78 Global Expansion

Ironically, it had proved infinitely easier to arrive at a compact with the

defeated Boers and from 1910 to welcome their leaders to power sharing
in the Union of South Africa – at the expense of the Africans and other
non-white communities. That was a model of how the evolved imperial
structure was meant to work, safeguarding this structure and its regime of
accumulation, bringing European-descended populations into junior part-
nership, and retaining vital assets like the Rand mines or the Suez Canal
secure under British control of one sort or another. It was instead at the
very heart of the enterprise that the contradictions could not be resolved
and the fuse was burning towards an explosion.

Further Reading
P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion 1688–
1914, Longman, 1993.
P.L. Cottrell, British Overseas Investment in the Nineteenth Century, Macmillan, 1975.
L.E. Davis and Robert Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: The Political
Economy of British Imperialism 1860–1912, Cambridge University Press, 1986.
C.C. Eldridge, Victorian Imperialism, Hodder & Stoughton, 1978.
A.R. Hall, The Export of Capital from Great Britain 1870–1914, Methuen, 1968.
Comprehensive.
Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Imperial Century 1815–1914: A Study of Empire and Expan-
sion, Batsford, 1976. Examines the relationship between informal and formal
empire.
Paul Kennedy, ‘Debate. The Costs and Benefits of British Imperialism 1846–1914’,
Past & Present 125, 1989. Critique of O’Brien, below.
P.K. O’Brien, ‘The Costs and Benefits of British Imperialism 1846–1914’, Past &
Present 120, 1988. Argues that imperialism was a drain on British resources.
Jeffrey Richards (ed.), Imperialism and Juvenile Literature, Manchester University
Press, 1989. Classic analysis of this theme.
A.J. Stockwell (ed.), Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire, Cambridge
University Press, 1996.
5
Imperial Relations

That an explosion did not occur in the British Isles in the manner which
seemed likely in 1914 was due to events there being overtaken by the onset
of general war in Europe, culmination of the politics of empire and the
inter-imperial relationships that had developed over three decades. The
empire which entered the conflict – for all King George’s possessions and
dominions became part of the war machine – was the same free-trade,
loosely articulated formation that had evolved into its final form around
the turn of the century. A different conception of how the empire might be
organised, and the function it could fulfil, was strongly pressed, as we shall
see, within the ruling class and on electoral platforms during the twenty
years before the outbreak, but had failed to gain political acceptance.

Settlement Colonies

Canada, Australia and New Zealand (South Africa was a somewhat differ-
ent case) for all their web of economic ties to Britain could not have been
compelled to enter the war alongside the state to whose head they were
formally subject if these colonial legislatures had decided otherwise, and
in that event it would have been unthinkable for the British to have at-
tempted any sort of forceful coercion. It would have been no less unthink-
able, however, for any of the three to have held back. To grasp why this
was so it is necessary to understand the character of the relations between
the settlement elites, the electorates of which they had to take account and
the imperial authority to which they looked for geopolitical guidance.
The first point to note is that the economic links were mutually benefi-
cial ones. These areas provided foodstuffs and raw materials to the British
market and interest and service payments to the financial apparatus, but
equally, as an outlet for their exports and source of loan funds, Britain was

79
80 Global Expansion

indispensable to the settlement colonies. Over the period between 1870

and 1914 the proportion of exports going to the settlement colonies (and
Latin America) expanded substantially at the expense of exports to the USA.
The shift in emigration patterns was much more marked still. At the start
of the period the United States was overwhelmingly the destination of
preference and between 1890 and 1900 28 per cent of emigrants went to
imperial destinations: between then and 1912 the percentage rose to 63
and in the latter year more emigrants left for Australia than the USA.1 British
defeat in a European war, if sufficiently serious, would have been calami-
tous for the settlement colonies’ economic and consequently political health.
All the same, such long-term and relatively abstract considerations would
not necessarily be decisive when faced with an immediate question of send-
ing their young men halfway round the world to spill their blood.
Although the men who exercised local rule in the settlement colonies
were extremely sensitive to any infringement on what they regarded as
areas of concern particular to themselves, they were nevertheless tied to
the Westminster government politically as well as economically. Nowhere
was this more apparent than in relation to foreign affairs and defence. The
colonial ruling elites had absolutely no experience of international rela-
tions or diplomacy and had always relied upon Westminster to act on their
behalf in dealings with foreign powers. Not even Cecil Rhodes had pre-
sumed to negotiate on his own account with Germans or Portuguese.
Moreover, the very military protection of these communities and the avail-
ability of military power as a bargaining chip in negotiations was entirely
within British hands. The Canadians had on their borders an infinitely
dynamic and potentially aggressive neighbour in the shape of the United
States, which, in the absence of British support and protection, threatened
always to reduce them to subservience if not encroach upon their terri-
tory. Australia and New Zealand had to some extent the natural protection
of distance and isolation, nevertheless in 1905 Japan had decisively de-
feated Tsarist Russia and revealed itself clearly as an expansionist imperial
power. Its range was as yet limited, but who could tell what ambitions it
might yet develop in the Pacific? In any case the Germans were already
there in New Guinea and the Pacific islands, albeit on a limited scale, but
much too close for comfort to British Australasia.
Yet when all these things are taken into account there can be little real
doubt that the principal bond between Britain – including the British state –
and the settlement colonies was one of sentiment, as it would have been
termed at the time, or a feature of identity politics as we might designate it
today. No doubt the almost complete autonomy which Westminster ac-
corded them in internal affairs did a lot to reinforce the sense of identifi-
 Imperial Relations 81

cation among the settlement colony elites – it removed potential issues of

dispute out of which a hostile sense of identity might have been forged.
The most potentially sensitive of these issues had been that of the unal-
located lands in the interior of the colonies – enormous reserves of real
estate capable of producing vast incomes for their eventual owners and
the lenders who advanced funds for their development. Legally these were
crown lands, with their ultimate ownership and the right to alienate them
vested in the British crown, but no British government ever tried to exer-
cise that putative right, leaving it instead in the hands of the colonial gov-
ernments. These elites therefore had the best of both worlds – the sense of
belonging to the greatest empire in all history and enjoying the protec-
tion of the central power but not finding that these circumstances had any
adverse implications for what they might wish to do in their own sphere
– as late as 1900 the personnel of the Colonial Office consisted of no more
than twenty clerks. Since these colonies were also resolutely committed
to the world capitalist system with its British leadership and, apart from a
few annoyances,2 to the framework of free trade, Westminster did not have
any reason to fear that the autonomy which they were accorded was in
any danger of being abused, in the sense of the ruling notions of the pe-
riod.
The sense of British identification was doubtless strengthened by the
fact that up to 1914 the majority of these colonies’ inhabitants, both elites
and masses, were first or second generation Canadians, Australians or New
Zealanders, the end of the nineteenth century having seen the greatest
surge of emigration, and so their identity was likely to be in any case felt
as a dual one. Modern forms of communication had, moreover, since the
beginning of the nineteenth century greatly shrunken the world. The
steamship and the telegraph kept the settlement colonies in continuous,
indeed daily, contact with Britain, by contrast to the unavoidable isola-
tion to which the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North American
colonies were subject. Formal sovereignty was located in a governor-gen-
eral appointed in London, the monarch’s representative who, like the Brit-
ish monarch, called upon the most favourably placed politician in the
colonial assembly to form a government. It was hardly an onerous rela-
tionship, and the majority of the white inhabitants of the settlement colo-
nies could get on with making money, bettering themselves, or even, in
Australasia, experimenting with social welfare schemes, secure in the
knowledge that their economies were well-integrated into the trading and
financial network supervised by the world’s strongest financial and naval
power, which also took care of their defence in the harsh outside world of
rapacious militarism.
82 Global Expansion

India

It was a very different story where the monarch’s overseas subjects had
different skin pigmentation. In the directly governed parts of India the
relationship was simple enough – few Indians, regardless of wealth or
education, could hope to occupy any but the lowliest of positions in the
administration, police or military and the representatives of the Raj, the
collectors and magistrates, comported themselves as, in Victor Kiernan’s
phrase, ‘the lords of humankind’.3 It hardly mattered what view the In-
dians themselves took of the situation. To quote a cliché, ‘resistance was
futile’:

The peasants and the tribal peoples who constituted the majority of the
population rose repeatedly in rebellion in many parts of the country ...
The immediate causes of these risings varied, but most were rooted in
the massive dislocations caused by the process of conquest and con-
solidation. The people driven to rebellion in sheer desperation included
peasants forced to give up cultivation during the period of plunder, tribes
deprived of their hereditary rights to the free use of forest resources,
tenants rack-rented or expropriated by landlords created under the new
tenures and cultivators hopelessly indebted to moneylenders (who
benefited from the new laws of contract) ... The forces of law and order
were almost invariably deployed in favour of their oppressors. The new
legal system was incomprehensible and too expensive to be of any use
to the poor ... The new equality before the law meant that a Brahmin
could now be hanged, but such triumphs of justice were of little conso-
lation to the peasant who lost his land to the moneylender or the land-
lord ... As late as 1899 famine mortality remained high because vast
sections of the population lacked the purchasing power to buy food even
when it was available.4

Some Indian thinkers nevertheless regarded it as, on balance, a positive

development, dragging the subcontinent, however painfully and insensi-
tively, out of its millennia-old superstition and obscurantism; a cognate
sentiment was that at least religious faiths of one sort or another were pro-
tected from molestation by rival ones. For others, undoubtedly the major-
ity engaged in peasant agriculture and handicraft trades, the Raj was mostly
an irrelevance – their forebears were well accustomed to surviving under
alien and predatory rulers and the British were merely the latest in a lengthy
line – although differing from their predecessors in that their machinery
of exaction was incomparably more efficient. Some, the surviving intelli-
 Imperial Relations 83

gentsia of the old cultures, may have regarded the colonial presence as an
outrage and humiliation, but it was clear that pre-British India was gone
past recovery, as the Mutiny had fearsomely underlined. In the era of high
imperialism any notion of expelling the invader was absent: it had no
material surface on which to get a grip, no social element in which it could
become embodied and effectively was an idea which could not be thought,
the necessary conceptual framework was absent. British rule for the fore-
seeable future had come to seem like a fact of nature.
When political organisation among educated Indians did begin to de-
velop towards the close of the century in the shape of the Indian National
Congress, its initial objectives were very limited, no more than to demand
a modest share in governmental authority for suitably qualified Indians,
and certainly in no way any kind of challenge to the Raj. It was not until
the aftermath of World War I, the Russian Revolution and the Comintern’s
proclamation in favour of complete colonial liberation,5 that the question
of Indian independence appeared at last on the agenda, to be taken up af-
terwards by Gandhi and the Congress politicians.
The existence of the princely states, former kingdoms of the Mughal
empire whose rulers had seen the wisdom of making treaties subordinat-
ing themselves to Company rule before they were forcibly evicted, pro-
vided advantages to British control in a number of senses. Most immedi-
ately and practically it delegated to these petty monarchs, with British
residents on hand to keep them up to the mark, the responsibility for ‘main-
taining order’ and thereby economised on personnel and resources with-
out in any way derogating from the Raj’s own supreme authority. Secondly,
they enabled the imperial government when convenient to avoid respon-
sibility whenever it was a question of carrying through progressive mea-
sures demanded by public opinion in Britain but which the Raj preferred
to avoid. Finally, and in due course, the princely states became a useful
lever for dividing the national movement by establishing another inter-
est which must be reconciled before any movement would be permissible
in the direction of Indian political rights or responsibility. In return the
Raj was pleased to underwrite their feudal privileges and condone their
misgovernment so long as it did not conflict with British requirements.

Africa and Others

Whether or not we include the special case of South Africa – which com-
bined the character of a settlement colony, rule over a numerically supe-
rior black helot population and relations with an antagonistic European
descended settler community – almost no generalisation can be made about
84 Global Expansion

the character of the governing structures prevailing in the African empire

except to say that as a general rule with many exceptions the British pre-
ferred where possible to work through subordinate African instruments,
even going so far in some cases as to create the institution of ‘chieftain-
ships’ where none had hitherto existed.
The state of affairs in Egypt was the one which most closely replicated
that in India – indeed Egypt might almost be regarded as an India in min-
iature in terms of the realities of the occupation, except that there was no
British civil service and the pretence was maintained of an pre-existing
Turkish sovereignty, under guidance but not eradicated. The conquest of
the Sudan in the 1890s was undertaken under the formal authority of the
Egyptian monarch – ultimately that of his ‘sovereign’ in Constantinople –
and the commanding general, Herbert Kitchener, used the Turkish title of
‘Sirdar’. As concurrently in India there was nothing around which an in-
dependence movement could at that stage focus, certainly not the corrupt
and degenerate court. At the end of World War I indeed, with Turkey a
defeated enemy power, the Khedive’s title was even promoted to that of
king and the country officially recognised as an independent state – which
did not of course prevent it from remaining as much under British control
as before.
In the parts of tropical Africa conquered by Britain or British agents there
were some indigenous kingdoms, such as that of the Ashanti north of the
Gold Coast, the Baganda beside Lake Victoria, or the Ndebele kingdom
north of the Limpopo as well as some emirates and sultanates in the liter-
ate Muslim sahel belt north of the Niger, but none of these sovereignties
was particularly extensive and most African polities where they existed
were very geographically restricted. The normal sort of legalism employed
for taking over new territory, whether by an authorised agent of the crown
or a freelance entrepreneur was, as illustrated in Chapter 2 with reference
to the British South Africa Company or Royal Niger Company, to persuade
a chief or potentate to accept a treaty placing his lands and people under
the protection of the British crown or chartered company – a treaty which
might well also contain clauses relating to mineral and land rights. In some
instances, where the African authorities were very fragmented, it might
be necessary to collect a stack of such treaties before the desired block of
territory to be claimed could be put together and, if necessary, negotiations
begun with any contending power.6 If an indigenous king rather than a
petty chief could be got to sign, so much the better; it made for less trouble
and fewer bribes. Of course, none of the illiterate signatories, confronted
with the novel technologies of pen and paper, had much idea of what they
were signing or signing away, and many, wholly unconscious of the mys-
 Imperial Relations 85

tic significance attached by Europeans to putting handwritten marks at

the end of certain texts, no doubt did so as a gesture of courtesy in defer-
ence to the peculiar customs of their visitors. When in due course the
implications of what they had done became plain, their people might well
rise in revolt, with or without their encouragement – which provided the
Europeans with a pretext for military action to squash whatever degree of
autonomy might have been left in the treaty and, if so minded, seize what-
ever land took their fancy. Such, for example, was the scenario played out
in Matebeleland, which became Southern Rhodesia.
Once established, and with overt resistance subdued, it became general
policy, except in the areas marked down for extensive European settle-
ment, i.e. the Rhodesias and Kenya, to disturb the pre-existing social and
political order as little as was compatible with extracting whatever sur-
plus might be available from a particular colony. In 1900 government ser-
vice in the dependent empire, excluding India, employed no more than
1,500 civilian functionaries. A prime consideration was to make the new
colony/protectorate pay the costs of its own acquisition and, if relevant,
conquest. This could be done through the imposition of taxes, which, as
noted above, had the additional advantage of forcing the indigenous popu-
lation into the labour market. Wealth-producing activities, however, where
they existed and could be tapped into by European commerce, were dis-
rupted as little as possible. Thus the aim on the lower Niger was to keep the
African peasantry cultivating the oil palm, the economic backbone of the
region, and likewise with the cocoa bean on the Gold Coast. The pre-ex-
isting indigenous forms of government could be reworked and utilised to
attain that objective.
Approaches of this kind could even be worked up into a theory of colo-
nial government for areas where the British presence was expected to be
numerically slight. Termed ‘indirect rule’ by its inventor and proponent,
Frederick Lugard, it was a generalisation of his practice in the large area of
northern Nigeria, to which he had been appointed governor, and imitated
to a degree the model of the princely states of India. It meant the mainte-
nance, where one existed, or creation if not, of an African authority, which
would conduct the actual details of government, with British power stand-
ing at a distance to ensure that the delegated authority was exercised in an
appropriate fashion. The idea was both to economise the resources which
the imperial power had to deploy, and to insulate so far as possible socio-
political relations among the colonised from any economic transforma-
tions that their colonial status might be bringing about – in other words to
freeze in place an authoritarian traditional or pseudo-traditional adminis-
trative structure intended to serve British interests and collect British taxes,
86 Global Expansion

using it to exclude from influence Africans who might have developed a

modern political consciousness as a result of economic changes and/or
European education.

The scheme of ‘indirect rule’, which the colonial administrator Frederick

Lugard developed in northern Nigeria, became the orthodox method
of ‘native administration’ ... Here political officers conducted local gov-
ernment through African chiefs. Ruling through chiefs triggered a quest
for chiefs: in societies where there were no chiefs ... the British created
them. In so doing they ... led administrators to advance some ethnic
groups over others. In India the British were accused of deliberately
highlighting the differences between Hindu and Muslim the better to
control them ... In Nigeria political officers favoured the Hausa against
the ‘coast African’; and the Malay was preferred to the migrant Chi-
nese in Malaya. Collaboration with some was matched with discrimi-
nation against others ... Subject peoples were identified as princes or
peasants, as warriors or clerks, as nomads or labourers, as Hindus or
Muslims, as ‘denationalised’ (that is, western-educated) or ‘real’ (that
is, uncorrupted by European influences) ... This contributed to the
compartmentalisation of colonial societies and the multiplication of
communal identities.7

Indeed, it was not only in Africa that similar principles were applied,
although mostly it was done instinctively rather than in the theorised form
developed by Lugard for tropical Africa. A highly significant instance re-
lates to the southern and eastern shores of the Arabian peninsula, where
in fact the development of such relationships had commenced much ear-
lier. The fragmented Arab emirates and sheikhdoms on the western side of
the Gulf were viewed, not surprisingly, as presenting an inviting target to
any power which might be inclined to make trouble for the British posi-
tion in India. (In the early nineteenth century the power in mind was
France.) Consequently, beginning in the 1820s, and by stages throughout
the remainder of the century, the feudal dynasts of the region were made
offers they could not refuse to place themselves under British protection,
which, thanks to the British navy and the Indian army, could be guaran-
teed without too much difficulty – as could their acceptance. From a com-
mercial or developmental point of view the region was initially worth-
less, its only value being a strategic one and the British government’s only
concern being to keep it out of the hands of a potentially hostile power.
Consequently, the new relationship had minimal or absolutely no impact
on the internal affairs of these petty autocracies.
 Imperial Relations 87

The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the occupation of Egypt thir-
teen years later underwrote the farsightedness of the earlier arrangements,
as the region was now closely situated near the Red Sea shipping routes,8
and British hegemony in the Gulf provided an additional security for the
canal. When in the course of the twentieth century it became evident that
these desert monarchies contained untold riches in the shape of oil be-
neath their sand, investment came pouring in, and from being peripheral
and secondary to the global economic structure the Gulf monarchies rose
to become of central importance. Indirect rule here had come to pay un-
foreseen and handsome dividends, both literally and metaphorically, for
with treaty-bound autocrats in charge of affairs, the oil wealth was safe
from interference by popular movements or political dissidence growing
out of the social transformations generated by the oil extraction industry.
At the other end of the Asian continent the use of similar procedures
consolidated the British position in parts of the Indonesian archipelago
not under Dutch control.9 Here again the initial motivation was to control
territory useful to cover vital forms of production, in this case Malayan
rubber; major trade centres like Singapore; or the Chinese shipping route.
Again, however, there proved to be an ultimate payoff of a different kind.
The Sultan of Brunei on the island of Borneo is said today to be the wealthiest
individual in the world, again as a result of holding property rights to an
underground sea of oil.

Clash of Empires

We have already taken note of the rivalry for territorial acquisitions in

Africa which first developed during the 1880s between several of the co-
lonial powers, in this case including Portugal, and continued into the
twentieth century The same process, though less sharply delineated, was
visible in Asia as well, and we now have to examine it in the context of
shifts in the global economy and political structure occurring in the years
leading up to 1914.
As a result of the communication innovations of the third quarter of the
century, telegraph, railway and steamships, all parts of the world except
the most remote or inhospitable were bound together into a single world
market, although because of transport inadequacies and surviving elements
of protectionism, not a wholly perfect one. Nevertheless, the free circula-
tion of goods, capital and, to an astonishing extent, labour as well, marked
a tolerably close approximation to the free trade universe conceived by
the Adam Smith inspired ideologues of the early nineteenth century, the
‘Manchester School’, while the same developments, combined with ad-
88 Global Expansion

vancing agricultural technologies, had enabled the capitalist mode of pro-

duction to evade – at least for the Atlantic economies – the Malthusian and
Ricardian traps that had haunted the nightmares of the said prophets –
namely the fear of population outstripping available food supplies or the
rate of return on invested capital falling to zero.
The global system was, however, not an undifferentiated mix of equal
actors in the world market, but a highly structured one, completely domi-
nated by the few economies which had made the breakthrough into ma-
chine technologies driven by artificial power sources. The fact that there
were several economies of this sort rather than just one, and stretching
from central Europe across the Atlantic to the eastern seaboard of north
America, was indicative that the industrial transformation, though in one
sense indifferent to state frontiers, had taken place, as it had to, within
state systems required to regulate property and class relations, their role in
fact becoming much enhanced as they were compelled to apply themselves
to taming and regulating the forces released by the new economic pro-
cesses which would otherwise certainly tear apart civil society. Capital
was thus simultaneously national and international, its representatives
not a homogenous transnational class, but British, Germans, French,
Americans, with particular state and military connections, systems of law
and administration, ideological and cultural outlooks. As the later years of
the century wore on, moreover, units of capital tended to grow, through
Darwinian processes of growth, extinction and absorption of the less fit in
the market struggle and also because size conferred evident advantages in
the competitive struggle, both in terms of economic power and political
clout.10
Capitalism being inherently competitive, it was unthinkable that state
power and diplomacy would not be called upon from time to time to supple-
ment the economic search for industrial, commercial or financial oppor-
tunities, but this was to introduce further complexity, for capitalist classes
are internally divided and competitive as well as nationally differentiated.
In addition, no capitalist class, even supposing that a general capitalist will
could have been identified, had unfettered control over its own govern-
ment11 – which in many cases contained representatives of social groups
far from content with capital’s generalised ascendancy,12 and in all cases,
whatever its social basis, always developed an official mind of its own
detached from particular class interests and had at least to purport to rep-
resent a common national interest transcending particular class ones.
Lobbying approaches by particular business interests would therefore not
necessarily succeed. Nonetheless, although success might not be achieved,
there was some point in lobbying one’s own government if an individual
 Imperial Relations 89

or company wanted commercial protection or advantage abroad: it was

scarcely worthwhile to do the same with a foreign one.
In instituting any particular line of policy on the world stage any gov-
ernment would have to take into account both the complex of internal
pressures and forces acting upon it – with its own members simultaneously
part of these same forces and standing at a distance from them – and the
perils and problems such a policy was likely to encounter both from diffi-
culty of execution and possible hostility evoked on the part of equal or
stronger powers. Disparity of military force might of course be neutralised
by cunning and diplomacy, as King Leopold demonstrated.
As the reach of the world economy, upon the foundations laid in the
third quarter of the century, pressed outwards in the fourth one in spite of
– or perhaps because of – the so-called ‘great depression’, the circle of great
powers had a joint interest in bringing the remaining unintegrated por-
tions of the globe – the interiors of Africa and China being the outstanding
unfinished business – into full market relationships. They likewise had
separate and contradictory interests in securing as much as possible of the
new opportunities for their national capital.
This is the context in which the British position has to be evaluated. In
the late nineteenth century the structures of international capital revolved,
like planets with a sun, round the City of London. The City did not need
to have direct direct control or overview of the economies in its orbit: its
gravitational attraction, to continue the metaphor, or, more literally, the
automatic processes of the gold-based international market, did all that
was required. The components of this unique position were many – they
included the long experience of international trade, money-dealing and
banking for which the City was renowned together with the enormous
accumulation of liquid capital from two centuries of successful rapacity
and entrepreneurship; the gigantic strength of the industrial economy; the
unsurpassable merchant and fighting navies; the integration of the settle-
ment colonies, acquired ad hoc for quite different reasons but by then major
world markets in respect of agriculture, services and capital; and India, the
‘jewel in the crown’. Eventually South African gold was added, the key-
stone of the arch, so to speak.
British products might be experiencing growing difficulty in overseas
markets – or even British ones – but British capital could go anywhere, and
in the years leading up to 1914 increasingly did so. The priority of the
British state was to sustain a world order in which this happy circumstance
could be made to continue indefinitely. So long as the circuits flowed with-
out impediment and the interest payments were safe, it did not much matter
to British finance whose flag flew over any particular part of the world, for
90 Global Expansion

the British lender could always compete favourably and was as likely as
not to prevail.13 The colonies and protectorates acquired after 1870 (ex-
cepting always the South African Republic) should therefore be seen less
as a first-order priority14 for the imperial system than an insurance policy
taken out to keep these parts of Africa and Asia within the open market –
the same objective to which policy was directed also in relation to China,
the Middle East and Latin America.
It was the weaker or newly emerging imperial powers, with less devel-
oped concentrations of national capital, which had a different priority and,
as competition intensified throughout the international economy, were
more likely to go colony-hunting with the deliberate aim of building up
protected and exclusive spheres for investment, trade and sometimes, it
was hoped, population transfers – though these latter were seldom very
successful. The powers in question were France, Russia and, latterly, Italy
and Japan.15 So far as they achieved success their objectives were automati-
cally in conflict with those of Britain. The aims pursued by Italy and Japan
were relatively limited ones and less likely to be viewed as a serious threat.
France and Russia by contrast were major powers, their colonial ambi-
tions viewed as endangering British interests both strategically and eco-
nomically in the Middle East, Africa and China. On several occasions
acerbic confrontations resulted, threatening more than once to erupt into
full-scale hostilities.

Leadership Contest

Neither France nor Russia, however, whatever jingoistic alarm they might
evoke from time to time, was a contender for Britain’s world leadership. In
terms of the global economic structure they were essentially regional pow-
ers (as at that stage was the USA) however far-flung their territorial em-
pires might be. Their war fleets and merchant fleets were far inferior to the
British, their economic strength in no sense comparable. France, to be sure,
was a considerable exporter of capital, but in a far more restricted fashion
than Britain, indeed its principal area of foreign investment was Russia
itself, its diplomatic and military ally.
The late nineteenth century saw not only the widening of the capitalist
universe but its deepening and intensification as well. From the 1870s,
while existing technologies were further refined and improved, a range of
new ones based upon electricity, chemicals and the petrol engine were
starting to make their appearance – and incidentally creating new demands
for products like oil, rubber and copper, abundantly available in the terri-
tories being newly drawn into the commercial network, such as the Gulf,
 Imperial Relations 91

Malaya or central Africa. The process is sometimes characterised as the

‘second industrial revolution’ and it exposed the weak side of the British
economic supremacy. With these new developments Britain, in com-
parison to the position she already held, lagged and was deficient in in-
novative thrust. The reasons are complex in detail but simple enough in
essence16 – the accumulation of profitable but increasingly antiquated
plant and fixed capital already in situ, and of course the hyper-reliance
upon capital export in place of modernising investment at the produc-
tive base.
The new technologies were being exploited with far greater effect in the
United States, still a world borrower rather than a lender, whose develop-
ment was still bound up with its own explosively growing internal mar-
ket and factors of production; and Germany, which was in a very different
position altogether. With less space and fewer resources than the Ameri-
cans German capital concentrated on scientific improvement, technical
education and lowering unit costs. Before the end of the century it had
driven British steel producers out of the markets of south eastern Europe
and was challenging British manufactures in Britain itself,17 while its ex-
panding merchant marine did likewise on the main ocean trade routes. At
the same time, though still a long way behind Britain and inferior even to
France, capital exports from Germany were developing strongly. In short,
Germany was emerging as a formidable competitor for Britain’s position
at the head of the world economic league and, with much greater moder-
nity and efficiency both in its industrial base and banking system,18 the
likely ultimate winner.
While the nineteenth century lasted there were, apart from minor fric-
tions over the Kaiser’s sympathy for the Boer republics, no Anglo-German
colonial confrontations. In fact, the German colonial empire was very
small – ridiculously so in view of the country’s economic and military
strength – and while unofficial chauvinist groups treated this fact as a griev-
ance, the reason was logical and straightforward enough – a formal over-
seas empire (except to supply bases for its expanding naval strength) was
largely irrelevant to the business of German imperialism. Protectionism
was not: the world as a whole with the exception of the UK was moving in
a protectionist direction and this type of economic policy was vigorously
practised in Germany, both for class reasons, to satisfy the agriculturally
inefficient but socially powerful landed elite, and to enhance industrial
strength. With the attention of German capital and the German state on
world markets and world power, however, a few scraps of tropical Africa
and the Pacific were of minor significance. Bismarck remarked in 1888
that his map of Africa lay in Europe.19
92 Global Expansion

Admittedly Germany’s home territory and population did not of them-

selves provide a sufficient base for launching the state as a world power.
The drive to subordinate foreign populations and integrate them into a
German-dominated economic framework was directed towards the east
and south, which for a continental power made a lot more sense. Well
before the end of the century the ancient Austro-Hungarian dynastic em-
pire had been turned into an economic and diplomatic satellite. There was
no hope of replicating the British achievement with the settlement colo-
nies as primary product suppliers and absorbers of capital, but every ex-
pectation that if the diplomatic-military arrangements could be got right
an equivalent role might be filled by the lands of the Habsburg empire and
the Balkan countries to the south east, along with Poland and the Ukraine
if they could be detached from the Russian empire. The notion of German
hegemony over eastern and south eastern Europe, accomplished through
a mixture of economic pressure and military threat – or action – was des-
ignated ‘Mitteleuropa’ and has been demonstrated to have operated as a
conscious long-term objective in the thinking of the German ruling class
and political/military establishment.20 These rulers were convinced, cor-
rectly, that the German state’s will to world power must ultimately be re-
solved by war. Their long-term but not very realistic strategy was to secure
British neutrality or neutralisation while hegemony over the continent
was attained, giving them the resources and power to tackle the British
empire itself in due course.21
‘The most explosive version of modern imperialism’, in the words of
the German historian Immanuel Geiss, was the adoption of Weltpolitik – a
world political stance by the German state around the turn of the century
as the new contender for world hegemony flexed its muscles.22 The results
were initially not always too impressive,23 but the general trend is indica-
tive and unmistakable, and one very significant success was secured at
British expense. For many decades the politically moribund Ottoman
empire had been virtually a British satellite. As a result of developments in
the first decade of the century German diplomacy succeeded in displacing
British influence and establishing itself at Constantinople as the Turkish
regime’s closest ally. German officers took over management of the Turk-
ish army, but an even more momentous outcome was the proposal to con-
struct a railway line from Berlin to Basra on the Gulf. The implementation
of this scheme would have enormously enhanced German commercial
influence in the Middle East and, more seriously, would bypass the Suez
Canal as the principal artery for shipping between Europe and the Far East,
with the gravest implications for the canal’s value to its Anglo-French
owners. Most seriously of all it evoked the nightmare prospect of the
 Imperial Relations 93

Kaiser’s magnificent soldiers debouching on the shores of the Indian Ocean

and the Gulf oilfields. Not surprisingly, the project was viewed in London
(though British capital was invited to participate) with the utmost appre-
hension and as a major provocation on a level with the German-initiated
competition in naval construction. This latter was viewed by British rul-
ers as the unmistakable sign that the German state did indeed have the
intention of eclipsing British naval supremacy and displacing Britain as
the dominant global power.
The bloody contest which got underway in 1914 was therefore not so
much, as Lenin phrased it, a struggle for the redivision of the world as one
to determine who its leading commercial power should be; compared to
which the redistribution of colonial real estate or even of spheres of trade
and investment opportunity were important but secondary concerns. The
line-up of opponents was altogether inevitable and the steady deteriora-
tion from the mid-1890s of the hitherto amicable Anglo-German relations
was a product of the recognition by both parties that these two were des-
tined to be the ultimate antagonists. The colonial issues which had up to
that point separated Britain from France and Russia were laid aside in short
order for the sake of agreements which, while they stopped short of for-
mal military alliances, were effectively binding agreements to support each
other diplomatically and in the event of war.
Combination with the two weaker of the great powers, the ones which
presented no substantial threat to its global hegemony, was the natural
option for the British state. The agreement in 1907 with Russia necessi-
tated the clearing up of some still extant rivalries and suspicions, princi-
pally the question of what to do with the oil-rich Persian empire, even
more moribund than its Turkish neighbour. The eventual agreement was
to partition the country – the last such major act prior to the war. The Tsar
was to take the north, the British the southern portion, while a section in
the middle was to be very generously left to the Persians. Outstanding dif-
ferences respecting frontiers in central Asia and continuing rivalries in
China were likewise composed. Most symptomatically, the British empire
(though in secret) pronounced its willingness to abandon a cardinal tenet
of nineteenth-century British foreign policy; namely its categorical em-
bargo upon Russian possession of Constantinople. Such a move signalled
ultimate recognition by the Foreign Office and the cabinet24 of the side
upon which they knew that the diplomatic necessities of the British em-
pire world force them to line up.
In the decade prior to 1914 a number of rehearsals took place for the
general conflict that was to erupt. On these occasions the now established
antagonistic blocs confronted each other, made threatening noises, per-
94 Global Expansion

formed diplomatic shuffles and settled the crisis to the marginal advan-
tage of one side or the other. Ostensibly in each case the issues at stake
were colonial or quasi-colonial ones, but should be understood rather as a
testing-out of the new alliances and manoeuvering for position. Britain’s
rulers participated not so much because they instinctively wanted to than
because they felt they had no other option. Not that the British empire
was under any imaginable territorial threat: but what was most definitely
in danger from a competitor with an advantage in the technologies of the
new age was the global commercial and financial superiority of which the
empire was only the most publicly visible expression.

The Chamberlain Project

Even as these developments were in train a rival and very different notion
of what the empire should be was being promulgated in ruling class circles
and carried on to electoral platforms. The conception advanced might
possibly be termed Bismarckian – it was essentially that of the empire as a
closed and integrated economic bloc following coherent economic, po-
litical and military policies designed to match the challenge of Germany
and the USA in systematic exploitation of the most advanced technologies
and economies of scale.25 It implied nothing less than the abandonment
of the world role hitherto played by British capital and its condensation
into an internally strengthened bloc confronting the other major blocs in
an intensified and more Darwinian struggle for world supremacy of a dif-
ferent sort – no longer as a global clearing house, but an aggressive com-
petitor for privileged access to markets, resources and spheres of invest-
ment.
The prophet and promoter of this version of the imperial dream was the
Birmingham screw-manufacturer turned politician, Joseph Chamberlain.
It emerged powerfully during his period of office in Lord Salisbury’s gov-
ernment in the 1890s and it culminated in the early years of the twentieth
century in his campaign of Tariff Reform, by which was meant the super-
session of free trade as the guiding light of commercial policy and the in-
stitution of protectionist tariffs to the disadvantage of foreign exporters
and the benefit of settlement colonies and overseas possessions.
Chamberlain aimed his appeal above all at industrial interests threat-
ened in the British market itself, and by extension in colonial ones as well,
by cheaper foreign manufactures. Obviously he did not argue that he
wanted to perpetuate obsolescence and inefficiency in British production
methods, but rather that British industry could more readily re-equip it-
self and grow stronger behind tariff walls by building up the necessary
 Imperial Relations 95

reserves for long-term investment. He canvassed working-class support

in addition on the argument that protection for British industry also meant
protection for jobs and, moreover, that the revenues raised from tariffs could
be used to fund extensions of social welfare. ‘The question is how to in-
crease the employment of the working classes’, he claimed when speak-
ing in the East End, on the same occasion denouncing unrestricted immi-
gration by ‘aliens’. Finally, he strove to convince bankers and brokers that
they too need have nothing to fear, since their profits could be maintained
or even improved in a consolidated empire as readily as under the exist-
ing regime.
Chamberlain had made his initial career, in accordance with his manu-
facturing background appropriately enough, as a radical liberal, first as
mayor of Birmingham, then as a leading figure and cabinet minister in the
Liberal Party. As a proponent of modernisation he had instituted ambi-
tious schemes of municipal reform in his home city, thereby acquiring a
foundation of popular backing which he never lost during his lifetime.
Partly out of frustrated egotism and partly out of genuine English nation-
alist convictions he led the revolt in the 1880s by a section of the Liberal
Party against Gladstone’s Irish policy, and from that point began to com-
bine populist rhetoric with increasingly reactionary and imperialist
stances.
His initially separate Liberal Unionist Party soon entered into effective
amalgamation with the Tories, and cemented the alliance through impe-
rial ideology. In the 1890s Chamberlain became a cabinet minister in
Salisbury’s administration, choosing, significantly, the Colonial Office
(whose concerns did not include India). From that position Chamberlain,
in a speech of 1896, advanced a scheme of imperial federation (an Impe-
rial Federation League was already in existence, founded in 1884) designed
to draw the settlement colonies closer to Britain by instituting an imperial
parliamentary assembly based in London, and trade proposals intended
to bind these units closer together and – although at this stage tariffs weren’t
mentioned – give each a bigger share in the other’s trade relations.
These projects soon ran up against the realities of the British govern-
ment’s relationships with the settlement colonies’ ruling elites. Though a
Canadian premier might have agreed that ‘English supremacy should
last until the end of time’ and the colonial (settlement colony) premiers
politely attended a colonial conference in 1897 to coincide with the Dia-
mond Jubilee, these elites were in no wise inclined to surrender their
growing political autonomy, masked though it was by the deference and
grovelling of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, to an imperial assembly
located in London and, inevitably, dominated by the mother country. Nor
96 Global Expansion

were they in any mood to see their own tender industrial growth, pro-
tected by their tariff systems, blighted by a system of imperial free trade
and free access for British producers. There did not even exist a standard
exchange rate between local colonial currencies and the pound sterling.
Chamberlain’s hopes for a Federal Parliament or even a ‘Council of Em-
pire’ got nowhere.
Thereafter he was occupied with more immediately pressing contingen-
cies; namely arranging the South African war and placing the Rand gold-
fields in politically safe hands – the successful attainment of which pro-
duced greater scope and renewed ambition to pursue the alternative
conception of empire which Chamberlain represented. In 1902 a colo-
nial conference was organised, but the outcome was no more satisfactory
than that of 1897. Its first decision

[r]ecognis[ed] that the principle of preferential trade between the United

Kingdom and His Majesty’s Dominions beyond the Seas would stimu-
late and facilitate mutual commercial intercourse, and would by pro-
moting the development of the resources and industries of the several
parts, strengthen the Empire.

The second decision went on to flatly contradict the first, in spirit if not in
letter:

This Conference recognises that, in the present circumstances of the

Colonies, it is not practicable to adopt a general system of Free Trade as
between the mother country and the British Dominions beyond the
Seas.26

The following year Chamberlain resigned his government position so

as to pursue his dream more freely; he took note of past setbacks and
avoided proposals such as political federation and empire free trade with
protection against outsiders, likely to offend the settlement colony lead-
ers, but concentrated instead on campaigning for the establishment of a
tariff wall around Britain itself, with imperial preference, which was in-
tended to produce the same effect in the long term, without provoking
colonial antagonisms.

I have felt for some time that this is a critical period in the history of the
Empire. What we do now and what our colonies do will probably in
the course of the earlier years of this century settle for all time the ques-
tion of whether a new empire, such as has never entered into the con-
 Imperial Relations 97

ception of man before ... whether such an empire shall be consolidated

and maintained or whether we are to drop apart into several atoms,
each caring only for our local and parochial interests. The Imperial idea
has only recently taken root in this country … [He goes on to reprove
the colonies for lacking enthusiasm for the imperial ideal.]

But the question of trade and commerce is of the greatest importance.

Unless that is satisfactorily settled, I for one do not believe in a contin-
ued union of the Empire. I hear it stated again and again by what I be-
lieve to be the representatives of a small minority of people of this coun-
try, those whom I describe, because I know no other words for them, as
‘Little Englanders’ – I hear it stated by them, what is a fact, that our trade
with these countries is much less than our trade with foreign countries,
and that therefore it appears to be their opinion that we should do ev-
erything in our power to cultivate that trade with foreigners, and that
we can safely disregard the trade with our children.
That is not my conclusion. My conclusion is exactly the opposite.
To look into the future, I say that it is the business of British tradesmen
to do everything they can, even at some present sacrifice, to keep the
trade of the colonies with Great Britain, to increase the trade and pro-
mote it, even if in doing so we lessen somewhat the trade with our for-
eign competitors.27

The concept of enhanced imperial unity supporting a more militant ver-

sion of imperialism had far-reaching implications and evoked a consider-
able measure of support among sections of the public. It implied a more
organised and disciplined population. The perils of racial degeneration were
mooted and widely discussed, provoking demands for Bismarckian-style
welfare initiatives. The National Service League under Field-Marshal Lord
Roberts agitated for compulsory and universal military training. The Navy
League, founded in 1894 to uphold British naval supremacy, had 100,000
members by 1914. Alfred Milner, former governor of South Africa, even
more determined on the war than his boss Chamberlain and administra-
tively responsible for the Chinese labour policy, emerged as a strenuous
and well-connected advocate of imperial unity and authoritarian govern-
ment. Juvenile organisations such the Boy Scouts, with the imperial ideol-
ogy in their bloodstream, duly appeared on the scene. The Round Table was
established as a kind of think-tank for the imperial elite. According to Milner:

Physical limitations alone forbid that these islands by themselves should

retain the same relative importance among the vast empires of the
98 Global Expansion

modern world which they held in the days of smaller states – before
the growth of Russia and the United States, before Germany made those
giant strides in prosperity and commerce which have been the direct
result of the development of her military and naval strength. These is-
lands by themselves cannot always remain a power of the very first rank.
But Greater Britain may remain such a power, humanly speaking, for
ever, and by so remaining, will ensure the safety and prosperity of all
the states composing it, which, again humanly speaking, nothing else
can equally ensure.28

Yet even before these schemes of creating a closely knit imperial federa-
tion had got seriously started, the economic linchpin of the new vision,
embodied in Chamberlain’s Tariff Reform agenda, had been decisively
broken. In the early years of the century he had succeeded in establishing
a formidable coalition. A part of manufacturing industry, afflicted by for-
eign competition in British and international markets, was interested in
the proposals. So were large sections of the landed elite and their lease-
holders, severely embarrassed by the ongoing depression which had
wrecked arable farming as far back as the 1870s and for whom agricul-
tural protection would have come as a godsend. Unionist elements of the
working class, above all in Chamberlain’s own Birmingham constituency,
were capable of being attracted as well by the prospects of increased job
security and welfare.

Many millions of leaflets were distributed. Many thousands of meet-

ings – from those on street corners to the Albert Hall – were held. The
press blared daily the same message ‘Tariff Reform Means Work for All’.
Tariff Reform Associations were formed in hundreds of constituencies
to enlist the rank-and-file behind the Chamberlain programme. Tariff
reform teas were held and Tariff Reform Pagents and plays were pre-
sented. Music hall ditties were composed on the subject. Finally, the
Trade Unionist Tariff Reform Association, with hundreds of local affili-
ates, was formed to enlist the working man to the cause ... the gramophone
was used to bring Chamberlain’s voice to smaller audiences; the music
halls sounded to sprightly Tariff tunes ...29

By 1905 Chamberlain’s background, reputation and demagogic ener-

gies had won over the rank and file of the Tory Party to his position. Tariff
Reform with its imperialist overtones was, like unionist imperial nation-
alism, if not quite to the same extent, one of the hegemonic ideas which
was capable of drawing together the streams of discontent upon the Brit-
 Imperial Relations 99

ish right into a single current, unifying diverse class strata and assuming a
populist dimension. It had geopolitical implications as well, for abandon-
ing the pretension to perpetual global supremacy in commercial and fi-
nancial transactions opened the prospect of an accommodation with Ger-
many and agreement to divide world supremacy in those spheres instead
of fighting over it – at least for the immediate future.

A Comparison

The spectacle at the opening of the twentieth century of challenge by right-

wing imperialist and technocratic authoritarians to a governing liberal
capitalist consensus has certain parallels with contemporary events in a
country that was regarded as the weakest of the great powers, or scarcely a
great power at all. If Britain had established its pre-eminent global role by
the adept exploitation of laissez-faire principles combined with the judi-
cious application of force where required, the ruling class in Italy had fash-
ioned the rather rickety unity of their state by a policy of systematically
bribing all interest groups capable of displaying any strength, together with
a brutal form of internal colonialism, all of which meant that entrepre-
neurs were left with a field in which they could enrich themselves by any
means that came to hand – usually corrupt and frequently violent. An
empire of sorts had been acquired in Africa – principally because by then
every self-respecting or aspiring power needed to have one30 – but in the
first decade of the century it was far from central to Italian realities.
In 1910 the Italian Nationalist Party (ANI), led by the journalist Corradini,
was founded to promote colonial expansion, anti-parliamentarianism and
economic reorganisation under the slogan of ultra-nationalism. Its spokes-
people were a circle of proto-fascist intellectuals, but its backers were were
the owners of the emergent high-tech industries in northern Italy, such as
Fiat and Olivetti, who envied the industrial organisation, imperial successes
and semi-absolute governments of Germany and Japan and dreamed of a
technocratic regime willing to promote growth in the most advanced and
scientific sectors of industry, discipline the labour movement and conquer
new market and investment opportunities abroad. In the socio-political
crisis after the war the ANI was to co-operate closely with Mussolini and
eventually merge with his fascist party.

Liberal Imperialists

The Chamberlainite campaign though was all to no avail: its support,

though far from negligible, was too restricted and its opponents were able
100 Global Expansion

to call the forces of democracy to their assistance. The new imperial idea
was unable to win either at the ruling class or the popular level. So far as
the former was concerned, the interests remained dominant that were
committed to free trade and the functioning of the empire as an auxiliary
system for a still greater role. They included still the bulk of manufactur-
ing industry, convinced that it stood to lose more than it gained from pro-
tectionism, trading concerns of all sorts, but above all the City and the
financial elite which had far too much invested, both literally and figura-
tively, in the existing structure to contemplate any such drastic change of
direction.31 So far as the masses were concerned, protectionism was viewed
overwhelmingly in terms of agricultural tariffs, and hence of dear food,
still by far the largest item of expenditure in the working-class and lower-
middle-class family budget. The outcome was in 1906 the worst electoral
catastrophe the Conservatives have ever experienced (not even exclud-
ing 1997), when they suffered an near wipe-out in Commons seats.32 Ironi-
cally, the Tory leadership was not at that point advocating protection– it
was the influence of Chamberlain which was feared: the leaders opposed
to him were seen as hopelessly beleaguered and losing their grip on policy
and control.33 The Liberal Party inherited a stunning majority. Paradoxi-
cally, the government it formed was compelled by the imperial logic, as
the German challenge advanced, not merely to retain but to strengthen
and extend the imperial policy of its predecessor, along with enhanced
military preparation against imperial rivals – and so to hurry the country
and the empire towards the armageddon waiting for it only eight years in
the future.

Further Reading
Harry Browne, Joseph Chamberlain: Radical and Imperialist, Longman, 1974. Short
and informative.
P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion 1688–
1914, Longman, 1993.
J.M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion
1880–1960, Manchester University Press, 1984. The definitive study.
J.A. Mangan, Making Imperial Mentalities: Socialisation and British Imperialism,
Manchester University Press, 1990. The development of imperial ideology at
home and abroad.
Andrew Porter, European Imperialism 1870–1914, Macmillan, 1994.
Bernard Porter, Critics of Empire: British Radical Attitudes to Colonialism in Africa
1895–1914, Macmillan, 1968.
Edward Said, Orientalism, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. An in-depth critique
of western attitudes.
G.R. Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency: A Study in British Politics and Political
 Imperial Relations 101

Thought, 1899–1914, Blackwell, 1971. The corruption of British politics and

social attitudes by imperial ideology.
Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform: English Social-Imperial Thought
1895–1914, Allen and Unwin, 1960. The first and very comprehensive discus-
sion of the British version, clearly bringing out the connections between social
authoritarianism in Britain and empire abroad.
A.J. Stockwell (ed.),Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire, Cambridge
University Press, 1996.
R.A. Webster, Industrial Imperialism in Italy 1908–1915, University of California
Press, 1975. Comparison with a weaker imperialism.
Martin J. Weiner, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850–1980,
Penguin, 1985. Controversial interpretation of the relationship between em-
pire, culture and economic decline.
6
Significance of Empire

Imperialism, as a raucously proclaimed doctrine and practice, was the most

pertinent reality of British society and politics for around thirty years prior
to 1914. Emerging out of a system of world commodity exchange to which
British capital was centrally important it developed to supplement, rein-
force and undergird that system, but not to replace one structure of accu-
mulation with a fundamentally different one. It was indeed closely linked
to the export of capital, though in an indirect rather than a simple and
straightforward manner, but the other characteristics identified by Lenin
as defining the era of imperialism – the growth of monopoly concentra-
tions of capital and the increasing interprenetation of finance and indus-
trial capital (not in any case very pronounced in Britain) – were secondary
considerations.
The effect that imperialism, whether in the more obvious sense or the
broader one of dominating the global exchange system, may have had upon
British economic development is an issue which continues to be debated
at great length and which it is possible here to do no more than touch upon.
Critiques of imperialism from a liberal and a socialist standpoint have
argued that the result was wholly adverse in that the diversion of capital
resources to foreign investment and/or colonial expansion starved the
home economy of funds which would have otherwise been available,
hindered re-equipment and improvement of the established industries and
retarded development of the new ones – not to speak of housing, health
educational and other forms of social expenditure.
The counter-argument is that matters were not so simple. Capital ex-
port, along with cultural connection to or political control over sources
of agricultural commodities and minerals, it is claimed, cheapened imports
and so reduced both raw material and wage costs, while overseas invest-
ment did not really divert capital from indigenous industry since most of

102
 Significance of Empire 103

the overseas investment was financed out of the profits of previous for-
eign lending. The reality of the British situation as the world’s clearing
house, reinforced by empire, according to this argument not only made
the City and its connected institutions enormously wealthy but exercised
a healthy effect upon the economy as a whole. The status of British invest-
ments in the empire per se is a different, though evidently related, matter.
The first question is whether these were more or less profitable than in-
vestment in British-centred enterprises. There is no consensus view among
economic historians and the debate still rages – a lot depends in fact upon
how the figures are calculated. My own view is that on the whole returns
were indeed faster and higher and that this differential was the magnet
which drew capital into the empire, both formal and informal. As Lenin
noted, cheap land and cheap labour – either absolutely or relative to out-
put – were the incentives that stimulated foreign investment as opposed to
doing so in the metropole.
The second, much more speculative, consideration, is whether, had the
economy been differently structured, i.e. had not been an imperial one,
the overall rate of return upon investment in British industry and tech-
nology would have been greater than it was. The answer, though impos-
sible to determine with any certainty, is probably not. The home economy
of the time, apart from a very few specialised units, also rested upon a foun-
dation of cheap labour, the central secret of profitability in British enter-
prise; and empire in its several senses made a considerable contribution to
perpetuating that cheapness. Hence the turn-of-the-century economy as
it then existed, but without the imperial advantages, would almost certainly
have been less profitable than it was. To take hypothesis even farther and
try to envisage the kind of development that might have occurred if Brit-
ish industrialisation had taken place in the absence of a position of global
commercial and subsequently financial supremacy is driving speculation
too far. Certainly contemporary critics of empire like Hobson were con-
vinced that improving the rewards to labour instead of investing overseas
would generate a bigger internal market and benefit capital as well in the
long run. Lenin’s retort was that while such a proposition might be true in
the abstract, for capitalism to behave in such a way it would have to cease
being capitalism. He was wrong, but not altogether so, for it required two
world wars and unprecedented social upheaval before Hobson’s hopes were
partially and temporarily fulfilled.
What can be claimed with some certainty is that the character of eco-
nomic, social and political structures, as they had developed out of eigh-
teenth-century commercial supremacy and the peculiarities of the British
industrialisation process as seen in both capital and labour markets, shifted
104 Global Expansion

emphasis and incentive away from any directed or urgent pressure towards
technological updating and renovation,1 so that even disregarding uncon-
trollable factors like inferior population and resources, British industry
lost ground to its US and German competitors beyond what was intrinsi-
cally necessary. The defence made of late nineteenth-century British en-
trepreneurs is that they successfully pursued the highest returns wher-
ever the market led them.2 Exactly so. It was the global market structured
by the dominant elite’s imperial vocation which placed them in such a
situation. The Chamberlainites, it may be said, were aware of the problem,
and wanted to address it by means of a rigged imperial market and authori-
tarian social policies.
In other words the industrial economy, in terms of contemporary stan-
dards, was failing in relation to roughly equivalent economies, for rea-
sons linked to imperialism, although no particular group of individuals
can be identified as being ‘to blame’. It was one case where structure un-
questionably prevailed over agency. Even more unquestionably the ethos
of imperialism, in its simplest sense, poisoned the cultural and intellec-
tual atmosphere of the times, infecting every class and faction of class,
producing a collective mentality that strengthened social subordination
and inflamed mindless patriotism. In Semmel’s words, referring to the
interwar years: ‘Whereas the earlier social-imperialists had spoken sotto
voce, Mosley shouted, but the elements of his doctrine were the same as
theirs.’3
The exotic aspects of empire were admirably fitted for spectacle and dis-
play. A propaganda barrage running the gamut from sermons and tabloid
journalism through scientific and academic texts to colonial exhibitions
and Empire Day inculcated recognition of the empire as a fact of nature
destined to last a thousand years – at least. It sustained and conferred status
upon a military caste which British civic culture and government parsi-
mony would not have tolerated if based permanently in the home islands.
It provided the opportunity for scions of the aristocracy and haute bour-
geoisie to lord it over pigmented populations with less restraint than they
had to show towards enfranchised members of the British lower classes,4
and in doing so fostered in them attitudes which they reimported to the
home country, reinforcing their presumption of governing it too by di-
vine right. It was a presumption which rubbed off upon sections of the
lower orders as well. The deference vote, reinforced by the jingoism which
imperialism inflated to yet wider dimensions, had always been present
since the arrival of a mass electorate and was assiduously cultivated by
Disraeli in the first instance. Did not the feat of governing a quarter of the
world’s population in the face of jealous rivals demonstrate beyond the
 Significance of Empire 105

last scintilla of doubt that the upper classes indeed possessed the qualities
which entitled them to command the lesser breeds at home as well as
abroad?
Evidence of racial superiority was proferred to even the lowliest Briton
(all too often with gratifying success) by reminding him (or less frequently
her) that the nation he belonged to ruled over the mightiest empire in
history and he was part of the achievement. More concretely, racism was
propagated at a mass level by emigrants who settled in South Africa or Kenya
or the rank and file British soldiers who served in the Indian army. In both
cases their experience of relations with conquered colonial populations
was such as to make racist assumptions second nature. Overall, these may
not have constituted an enormous number of individuals, but they all had
families and circles of friends with whom they were in communication
and who absorbed their experience at second hand. In short, the ideology
of empire put down deep, deep roots into British society and its collective
consciousness.
It penetrated even the contemporary labour movement. ‘Few members
of the British working class evidently saw subjects of the empire as fellow
victims with whom they should identify.’5 Lenin, writing in 1916 when
he had particular reasons for postulating such a relationship, blamed the
corruption on ‘labour lieutenants of capital’ – MPs, party functionaries,
trade union officers, who were allegedly bribed out of the superprofits
generated from imperialism, as an insurance policy on the part of capital,
and who were responsible (he did not have only Britain in mind) for blind-
ing, misleading and politically enervating the mass of workers whose class
instincts remained sound and who themselves gained no benefit from the
existence of imperialism. When capital could no longer afford such brib-
ery, Lenin declared, the proletariat would be in a position to understand
the true situation.
The picture is overly simplistic. The stratum of full-time labour leaders
that the workers’ movements had brought into existence had indeed long
ceased to have a revolutionary consciousness, if they ever did, but Lenin’s
strictures and attributions of motive are much too crude and unhistorical.
The ‘labour lieutenants’ succumbed to the imperial embrace not as a rule
because their palms were crossed with silver exacted from imperial
superprofits but because imperialism was the climate of the times and there
appeared to be, in the words of a later reactionary, ‘no alternative’.
The framework of assumptions which the trade union movement and
the nascent Labour Party brought to their perspectives on the empire in
the early years of the century therefore accepted its permanence and the
duty of British governments and administrators to guide and direct the
106 Global Expansion

fortunes of communities standing at what, it was taken for granted, was a

lower level of civilisation – even if the movement’s spokespeople proposed
to guide and direct them in a generally more humane manner than the
ruling class had been accustomed to do. ‘Hence it came about that while
they day-dreamed of transforming the empire into a true federation, in
reality the empire was transforming them. They were soon growing con-
tent to change it by giving it a new look, contemplating it in a new light,
as Hegel did with Prussian autocracy.’6 The Webbs in 1902 formed a din-
ing club, called the Coefficients, with the purpose of promoting among
the political elite the notions of national efficiency and a strong empire,
and the Director of their intellectual offspring, the London School of Eco-
nomics, was W. A. S. Hewins, a rabid imperialist.7
To some extent this was a question of self-interest as well as humanitar-
ian impulse. Labour leaders were conscious of the dangers of wages in
Britain being undercut by cheap colonial labour employed in enterprises
paying subsistence wages or less and wholly lacking in labour protection
or control. The textile mills beginning to appear in India were an immedi-
ate and pertinent instance. British labour was to the fore in the campaign
against ‘Chinese slavery’ in South Africa which contributed to the epic
Conservative defeat of 1906, and we have already noted George Bernard
Shaw’s reaction to the Denshawni horror. So far as the political aspira-
tions of colonial populations were concerned, however, the official labour
movement scarcely improved upon the hostility and incomprehension
emanating from bourgeois sources. ‘We have a diverting picture of Keir
Hardie,’ writes Victor Kiernan, ‘(... the man who had staggered Westmin-
ster by turning up at the House in a cloth cap, as if bent on immediate red
revolution) gravely conversing with a magistrate in Benares on the im-
portance of encouraging landowners and others with a stake in the coun-
try, as a moderating influence.’8 Bernard Semmel lists around a dozen trade
unionists in leading positions who were associated with Chamberlain’s
Tariff Reform campaign.9
Turning to the intellectual or revolutionary wings of the movement does
not present a radically more encouraging picture. The Fabian Society,
which saw socialism being attained in the long run via reformist bureau-
cratic efficiency, was in fact the most articulate exponent of labour imperi-
alism and envisaged the empire with its human and material resources
as an integral part of an advance to socialism for the British people –
almost a left-wing equivalent of Chamberlainism. ‘Theoretically [the Rand]
should be internationalised, not British-Imperialised; but until the Federa-
tion of the world becomes an accomplished fact, we must accept the most
responsible Imperial federations available as a substitute for it’, wrote Ber-
 Significance of Empire 107

nard Shaw in Fabianism and the Empire. ‘The design of socialism in this
pattern is to turn Empires into true Commonwealths. Shaw’s manifesto
imagines a Fabianising of the Empire in the cause of efficiency – a cause
that Webb himself was to put his signature to the following year with Tract
No. 108, A Policy of National Efficiency.’10 At the other end of the socialist
spectrum in Britain the Social Democratic Federation, with Marxism as its
formal ideology, was led by H. M. Hyndman, an avowed and unashamed
imperialist and strenuous advocate of a big navy on social-imperialist
grounds – i.e. not only would it consolidate the empire and deter foreign-
ers but also provide employment in British ship yards. Possibly ‘the left
never wavered in its condemnation of colonial wars and conquests’11 but
it did not seriously challenge the existence of empire. At best ‘their analy-
sis and definitions of the new “imperialist” phase of capitalism ... rightly
saw colonial annexation and exploitation simply as one symptom and
characteristic of that new phase: undesirable like all its characteristics, but
not in itself central’.12

Opponents

For an opponent of empire on principle it was a depressing spectacle, and

there were some who managed to rise above the horizon of imperialist
presumptions. Two individuals who were themselves part of the elite and
notable for their careers in exposing imperialist atrocity were Wilfrid
Scawen Blunt and Roger Casement. The former denounced imperialism
in the Middle East and the manoeuvres and violence by which its territo-
ries had been brought under British control. The latter, as a British consul,
publicised the horrors of rubber extortion in South America and King
Leopold’s Congo. These, of course, were not British colonies and indeed
Casement was awarded a knighthood by HM government in recognition
of his humanitarian endeavours. His turning against British imperialism
led him to identify with the movement for Irish independence and led
him to execution in 1916 for a different kind of anti-imperialist endeav-
our. As opponents of and propagandists against particular abuses of empire
E. D. Morel should be mentioned, as should the Aborigines’ Protection Soci-
ety, although the latter, understandably enough in the circumstances, often
favoured direct government control with London-appointed officials as a
check on the depredations of settlers and freebooters.
One British name stands out as a critic who generalised from the par-
ticular circumstances of South Africa to launch a thoroughgoing critique
of imperialism as an economic reality and mainstay of political culture.
This was J. A. Hobson, who in politics was a Liberal. In Imperialism (1902)
108 Global Expansion

Hobson interpreted the expansionism of the previous twenty years as

an effect of capital seeking new fields of investment abroad – which he
defined as ‘the economic taproot of imperialism’ – in consequence of
restricted markets at home, the restriction itself being attributed to defi-
ciency of demand arising from the low incomes suffered by the majority
of the population. Hobson condemned imperialism as detrimental to
Britain’s economy and society in a number of dimensions. By diverting
capital abroad it did more than simply retard the improvement and ex-
pansion of the country’s industrial base, it centred economic (and ulti-
mately political) power in the financial elite and their hangers-on con-
centrated in south-east England, and threatened ultimately the fate of
deindustrialisation.
Hobson recommended as an alternative to imperialism a deliberate
programme of increasing consuming power among the masses through
enhanced wages and welfare benefits – a sort of proto-Keynsianism. Lenin,
when he came to write Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism esteemed
Hobson’s analysis very highly, above that of German Social Democrat
commentators, to the degree that historians have referred – inaccurately –
to the Hobson–Lenin thesis. In fact, Lenin wholly rejected an important
aspect of Hobson’s argument, namely the underconsumptionist thesis
which attributed the pressure to invest abroad to deficiency of home de-
mand. ‘The profits are higher – that is all’ was Lenin’s alternative,13 and as
noted above he regarded Hobson’s ideas of increasing workers’ consum-
ing power as wholly utopian.
It has to be acknowledged that in spite of the the work and writing of
these as well as less celebrated individuals, prior to 1914 there was no
collective and organised opposition to imperialism in Britain and the the
ripple of public disquiet and reaction which followed the indifferent per-
formance of British arms in the South African war, together with revela-
tions of how concentration camps had been used to grind down the Boer
resistance, did not fundamentally affect the picture. Following World War
I, however, even as the empire set its bounds still wider, popular imperial-
ism had become what Americans would call a busted flush: the experience
of that war, Irish revolt, Russian revolution and events in India had soured
public attitudes irrevocably to the myths and pretences that had formerly
sustained the imperial dream. The earlier anti-imperial voices crying in
the wilderness now resonated with the disillusion felt towards the entire
economic and political system which had produced first the holocaust of
the trenches and then in the immediate aftermath economic collapse and
immiseration. Colonial liberation, if it still had a very considerable dis-
tance and another world war to go, was now at least thinkable.
 Significance of Empire 109

That, however, remained a minority trend for the time being. Perhaps
the most remarkable political fact of the interwar years is that with the
most democratic franchise yet seen the Conservatives, the party of un-
regulated markets, imperial flag-waving and nostalgia, easily dominated
the electoral history of those decades. Nevertheless, when compared with
the prewar ecstasies, even the Tories’ enthusiasm appeared half-hearted
and lacking in conviction, and the protected trading bloc brought into
existence after 1932 following the abandonment of the gold standard was
nothing more than a parodic caricature of Chamberlain’s grand Imperial
Federation.
These developments regrettably did not represent a final abandonment
of imperial megalomania. World War II, while it produced enormously
positive effects in British social relations and politics, also to an extent
revived imperial sentiment, since as part of the life-and-death combat
against fascism, the empire, along with other outmoded and baneful insti-
tutions, could be presented in a comparatively favourable and rejuvenated
light, and as we now know it totally seduced the ministers of Attlee’s 1945–
51 government.14 Overseas possessions were only a part of this vision –
indeed the lesser part – and India was surrendered with relative equanim-
ity and goodwill: the objective was to continue to play the role of a Great
Power, both financially and militarily, only this time under the umbrellas
of the US dollar in the first instance and US nuclear armoury in the second.
These twin aims have constituted the maleficent heritage of imperial-
ism which fatally undermined the social programme and the electoral
viability of Attlee’s governments. They continued to form the central pur-
pose of his successors and lie at the root of the dramatic failure of the Brit-
ish economy during the second half of the twentieth century. The life-
draining ambition to cut a major figure on the world financial stage remains
in place and continues to devastate what remains of the country’s indus-
trial capacity as well as its social infrastructures, for though the form would
change with European monetary integration, the reality would not. Even
the apparently buried memory of worldwide possessions and military
power exercised across the globe is capable of dramatic resurgence with
momentous political results, as the Falklands War demonstrated only too
forcefully. The spectre of empire continues to stalk Britain, and on the eve
of the twenty-first century it has still to be exorcised. The history of the
modern world has been structured by imperialism, with the events of the
years 1870–1914 constituting only one stage in a process which is still
ongoing. All nations have been profoundly affected by it, but none more
so than Britain, the most successful practitioner of overseas colonialism.
The empire on which the sun never set is still casting its shadow.
Notes
Preface

1. Andrew Porter, European Imperialism 1860–1914, Macmillan, 1994, p.39.

2. See especially Victor Kiernan, Marxism and Imperialism, Edward Arnold, 1974,
pp.37–60.
3. It is worth noting that Hitler intensely admired the British achievement in con-
quering and ruling India and that his favourite film was Bengal Lancer.
4. For example, George Bernard Shaw on the Denshawni Horror of 1906 – see below.

Introduction
1. Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern World: Ten Great Writers, Penguin, 1989, p.85.
2. Ibid., p.256.
3. Ibid., p.277.
4. A.J. Stockwell (ed.), Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire, Cam-
bridge University Press, 1996, p.168.
5. Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe, Penguin, 1993, pp.313–14.
6. Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975. The
north-east of Ireland also saw (in the seventeenth century) colonisation in
the modern sense – the displacement of the native Irish by settlers from main-
land Scotland.
7. The bullion came partly from plunder and partly from slave-worked mines.
Its importance came from its role as the basis for liquid capital: its inflation-
ary impact has been exaggerated.
8. Or ‘gentlemanly capitalists’, the phrase of P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British
Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion 1688–1914, Longman, 1993.
9. By the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, following the Anglo-Scottish state’s first major
commercial war, British merchants acquired the monopoly of supplying slaves
to the Iberian colonies of South America.
10. The concept of ‘Industrial Revolution’ has attracted nearly as much debate as
the question of imperialism. I am treating it as a self-evident reality.
11. Although there was one important exception: the loss of the American to-
bacco monopoly by Glasgow merchants stimulated industrial development
in that region.
12. Capital, vol. 1, Penguin edition, 1976, p.926.
13. This concept was initially advanced by Emannuel Arrighi in The Long Twenti-
eth Century, Verso, 1994, though his interpretation differs from mine in cer-
tain respects.
14. There were yet further British territorial acquisitions after 1918, with the share-
out of spoils from the defeated German and Turkish empires, but by then the
political imperial structure had entered irreversible decline. See John Callaghan’s
Great Power Complex: British Imperialism, International Crises and National De-
cline, 1914–51, Pluto Press, 1997.
15. But see the arguments advanced by Perry Anderson at various points, com-

110
 Notes 111

mencing with ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, New Left Review 23, Jan./Feb. 1964.
These writers stress the social and political weight of a commercial and finan-
cial bourgeoisie linked to landed wealth.
16. P.J. Marshall, ‘The World Shaped by Empire’, in Stockwell (ed.), Cambridge
Illustrated History of the British Empire, p.10.
17. Not only the Bengal weavers suffered in this episode. The Indian export trade
provided the necessary foundation for the expansion of mechanised weav-
ing in Britain which destroyed the British handloom weaving industry, along
with most of its workforce.
18. E.E. Williams’ alarmist tract published by Heinemann in 1896 (reprinted Harvester
1973) under the title Made in Germany warned the British public that the very
internal markets of the UK were being colonised by German products.
19. The two most notorious instances were the production of aniline dyestuffs
and ‘basic’ steel where British inventions had been exploited in Germany to
create new industries.
20. Also studies of imperialism written in the years before World War 1, by J.A.
Hobson (from whom Lenin derived much of his information in relation to
the British variety), Rudolf Hildfering, Rosa Luxemburg and Nikolai Bu-
kharin.
21. V.I. Lenin, Selected Works, Vol. 5, Lawrence & Wishart, 1936, p.31.
22. See the first two chapters of Kiernan, Marxism and Imperialism, for a discus-
sion of these relations.

Chapter 1. The British Empire on the Eve

1. The circumstances of the period of late nineteenth-century empire building
might well have reversed the terms and been called ‘the free trade of impe-
rialism’.
2. The Communist Manifesto, intro. Eric Hobsbawm, Verso, 1998, pp.39–40.
3. With the development of refrigeration in the 1880s even certain perishable
products, mainly carcasses, could be incorporated into long-distance trade.
4. The slowing pace of railway construction in Britain during the second half of
the century made it more important for railway contractors to find markets
abroad, particularly in India and the settlement colonies.
5. The British government was seriously considering withdrawal from its West
African outposts.
6. Not everywhere however. The influential German economic thinker Frederick
List argued for the importance of protection in developing ‘infant industries’.
7. Quoted in E.L. Woodward, The Age of Reform, Oxford, 1938, p.412.
8. Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, pp.329–30.
9. In some cases, such as China and the Ottoman empire, the semi-colony status
was imposed by several European powers acting conjointly. This had been
the original intended form of control for Egypt as well, but in the end that
became a virtual colony of Britain alone.
10. Edward Thompson, ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, Socialist Register, 1965, p.343.
11. The practice of transporting involuntary ones – convicts to Tasmania and
Australia – ceased in the 1850s.
12. Sometimes also a mineral potential, as with Australian gold.
112 Global Expansion

13. ‘... what “maturity” meant to the British, among other things, was that some
of the colonies in Canada and Australia had developed into well-ordered
capitalist societies capable of functioning as satellite economies without di-
rect intervention’, Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, p. 238.
14. An intriguing sidelight upon this is that the cattle ranching enterprises of the
south-western states, the material foundation for the cultural artefact of the
wild west, were largely funded from Dundee.
15. In the words of one Viceroy, Lord Mayo, ‘We are all British gentlemen en-
gaged in the magnificent work of governing an inferior race’, C.C. Eldridge,
Victorian Imperialism, Hodder & Stoughton, 1978, p.223. ‘A despotism con-
trolled from home’ according to the first Secretary of State for India, ibid.,
p.224.
16. Stockwell (ed.), Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire, p.156.
17. Indentured workers were brought from India to British Guiana as a more
reliable labour force than the former slaves were thought to be.
18. ‘Niggers are tigers’, was the remark of the poet laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
quoted in Porter, European Imperialism, p.24.
19. Though the Irish Home Rule MPs elected under the new franchise most cer-
tainly did.
20. ‘One nation’ was the slogan which encapsulated this approach.
21. Seeley’s Expansion of England, published in 1883 and a runaway success, was
based on lecture courses prepared in the 1870s.
22. See Tom Nairn, The Enchanted Glass: Britain and its Monarchy, Radius, 1988.

Chapter 2. The Drive into Africa

1. In the 1830s the ruler of Egypt, Mehemet Ali, acted in complete independence
of his nominal sovereign, waged war against him and even came close to cap-
turing Constantinople until prevented by the British, who did not want Middle
East power relations disturbed to their potential disadvantage.
2. E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875–1914, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987, p.74
3. L.C.B. Seaman, Victorian England, Routledge, 1993, p.357.
4. Its leader, Arabi Pasha, was deported rather than being handed over for execu-
tion – perhaps a sign of bad conscience on the part of Gladstone’s government.
5. ‘The assertion that the British government did not desire to occupy Egypt only
amounts to saying that it would have preferred to go on with the cheaper
method of letting Egypt be exploited through a native puppet; just as the US
marines are only sent to a banana-republic when the local dictator fails to deliver
the bananas’, Kiernan, Marxism and Imperialism, p.77.
6. Some newspapers reporting Gordon’s death were printed with special black
borders.
7. The Times, editorial, 3 May 1884.
8. R. Robinson and J. Gallagher in their celebrated Africa and the Victorians,
Macmillan, 1961, use this fact as evidence that African affairs were regarded by
British governments mostly as an irritating sideline with no economic implica-
tions, and the partition determined purely by determination to protect the
sea-routes to India.
9. Shortly thereafter a British agent was put in place as the Sultan’s first minister.
 Notes 113

10. The agreement arrived at with Germany involved the transfer of the island of
Heligoland, a British dependency off the coast of Germany, to German sov-
ereignty – in spite of the unwillingness and protests of the Heligolanders. The
episode makes an interesting comparison with the Falklands affair in 1982.
11. The large, ethnically mixed population of ‘Coloureds’ should also be noted.
12. See Charles van Onselen, ‘Randlords and Rotgut’, History Workshop 2, 1976.
13. Not that Rhodes remained content with such modest ambitions. His will – in
1873 – provided for the funding of a secret society with the objective of ex-
tending British rule around the globe and directly occupying,‘the entire con-
tinent of Africa, the Holy Land, the valley of the Euphrates, the islands of
Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the islands of the Pacific
not heretofore possessed by great Britain, the whole of the Malay archipelago,
the sea-board of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States
as an integral part of the British Empire ...’ – making the contemporaneous
perspectives of Bartle Frere appear modest indeed.
14. ‘In securing this privilege Rhodes was greatly assisted by Sir Hercules Robinson,
the Governor of the Cape, who had sizeable investments in Rhodes compa-
nies and was economical with the truth in presenting the Company’s creden-
tials’, Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, p.376.
15. M.E. Chamberlain, The Scramble for Africa, Longman, 1974, pp.135–6.
16. London Gazette, 13 July 1886.
17. It is an interesting aside to note the assumption that the concepts of English
property law could be directly applied to the populations of the African sa-
vannah belt.
18. Evidently this clause was varied for Muslim rulers who were literate in Arabic.
19. The analyses of Fritz Fischer are crucial for understanding, from the German
angle, the links between imperialism and the origins of World War I. See his
Germany’s Aims in the First World War, Chatto and Windus, 1967.
20. Kiernan, Marxism and Imperialism, p.79.

Chapter 3. Other Extensions

1. Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, p.335.
2. Ibid., p.338.
3. Ibid., p.342.
4. Ibid., p.341.
5. Ibid., p.350.
6. The drug was also extensively used in Britain, famously by artists and literatii,
but also generally as an analgesic – all that was available prior to aspirin – and
even as a pacifier for babies.
7. Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, pp.425–6.
8. Quoted in ibid., p.429.
9. The under-secretary at the Foreign Office was a substantial shareholder.
10. Which, incidentally, did much to increase British business with Japan as well.
11. Where, interestingly, they continued to maintain a nominal ‘emperor’.
12. A Punch cartoon of 1898 shows John Bull trying to restrain a Frenchman,
German and Russian from tearing apart a helpless emperor.
13. An interesting comparison suggests itself with Tsarist Russia, where in 1905–6,
114 Global Expansion

to protect the already enormous French stake in the country, the French gov-
ernment and investors intervened with a loan to save the regime from being
swept away by revolution.
14. Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, p.441.
15. One such suitable authority was the compliant Siamese monarchy. Conse-
quently that state escaped formal annexation.
16. ‘In 1896 reinforcements enabled a large-scale “pacification”(the favourite Eu-
ropean term) to be undertaken, [in northern Sumatra] and in the next few
years the Dutch – whose long-lost kinsmen in South Africa were just being
pacified by the British – broke the back of the resistance’, V.G. Kiernan, Euro-
pean Empires from Conquest to Collapse, Fontana, 1982, pp.108.
17. According to R.C.K. Ensor, ‘perhaps the most successful of her tropical colo-
nies’, England 1870–1914, Oxford, 1936.
18. L.L. Gardiner and J.H. Davidson, British Imperialism in the late 19th Century,
Edward Arnold, 1968, pp.46–7.
19. It was, of course, in its origins a counter-revolutionary war, but with the es-
tablishment of the Napoleonic imperial regime that aspect had become a sec-
ondary one.
20. Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, p.301.
21. British public opinion, however, was divided over whether the Ottoman re-
gime deserved to be propped up. Its tendency from time to time to massacre
its Christian subjects constituted extremely bad public relations.
22. In 1914 it had about 700 offices and 9,000 employees. ‘It virtually controlled
central government finance, exerted great influence over railway concessions
and other developmental projects and received diplomatic support from the
major powers and assistance from the principal foreign banks’, Cain and
Hopkins, British Imperialism, p.405.
23. Ironically, the two worst defeats suffered by British (and imperial) forces dur-
ing the war were inflicted by the Turks – at Gallipoli and the lesser-known
surrender at Kut in Mesopotamia.
24. See below, Chapter 5.
25. The point applies with equal force to Afghanistan, which greatly exercised
the Foreign and India Offices (to the extent that a declaration of war against
Russia was actually printed in the 1880s), but where few could have hoped
for significant returns on investment – least of all on loans to rulers.

Chapter 4. The Evolved Imperial Structure

1. And some not very developed ones, such as the Russian empire.
2. But see below, Chapter 5.
3. At least outside the island of Tasmania, where the indigenous population was
actually exterminated – the only example of total genocide in nineteenth-cen-
tury colonisation.
4. Ensor, England 1870–1914, p.377.
5. A tropical fruit, the banana, introduced to British tables in the 1870s, gave an
enhanced importance to the West Indian colonies.
6. The usual methods of meeting the government debt payments were by taxes
on agriculture exports and imports. The peasant producers paid, by being com-
 Notes 115

pelled to export any surplus above subsistence (and frequently were driven
into destitution or starvation) and by paying a higher price for imported com-
modities they might use.
7. Egypt being a particular case in point.
8. Investments were made for instance in Bihari coal mines. By the early twenti-
eth century factory textile production was of growing significance.
9. The ferocity of King Leopold’s regime in the Congo Free State was the prod-
uct not purely of sadism on the part of his officials and African allies, but also
of the intrinsic difficulty of establishing routine systems of exploitation in the
conditions of the equatorial rain forest.
10. A. Keppel-Jones, South Africa: A Short History, Hutchinson, 1961, p.175. These
contract labourers were recruited on comparatively generous terms, being given
land grants at the end of their contract. Some wealthier Indians also arrived
spontaneously to take advantage of commercial opportunities.
11. The practice of indentured labour had started well before the era of late nine-
teenth-century imperialism – indeed, as soon as slavery was abolished in the
British empire. The first Indian indentured labourers were shipped to Mauritius
in 1834.
12. Though not always, when bigger issues were at stake. French officials seized
without compensation the property of a British trader on the West African
island of Matacong. Despite intensive lobbying Lord Salisbury’s government
refused to react, because such intervention would have detracted from the
success of a satisfactory border agreement.
13. The famous verse about the Maxim gun tells its own story. The case of the
dum-dum bullet is also relevant. The expanding bullet was so named because
of its production in the Indian cantonment of Dum Dum. It was devised
specifically because it was asserted that regular bullets were incapable of stop-
ping ‘savages’.
14. In 1881 69,647 British troops were stationed in India, with 125,000 Indians
serving in the British army. The next largest colonial garrison was positioned
in Malta – its strength was 5,626, Porter, European Imperialism. By 1906 the
figures were respectively 74,000 and 157,000, together with around 100,000
reserves and auxiliaries and 146,000 troops from the Indian princely states.
15. Russia was in fact regarded as Britan’s most serious imperial rival, the interests
which it was felt to threaten being far more important than any menaced by
French expansion in Africa.
16. The prohibition, R. Palme Dutt remarks, was applauded by progressive In-
dian opinion of the time, India Today, Gollancz, 1940, p.273.
17. The earlier abolition of slavery, by the Jacobin-dominated Convention in
France in 1793, was of course quietly forgotten.
18. The Trinidadian writer and historian, Eric Williams, had claimed in Capital-
ism and Slavery (University of North Carolina Press, 1944) that the slave trade’s
profits were the foundation of the Industrial Revolution, but this probably
exaggerates the relationship, although it was certainly important.
19. The more famous producers of boys’ fiction on imperial themes were skilled
and able story-tellers, as I can testify from personal experience; names such as
Rider Haggard and G.A. Henty.
20. Journals such as the Illustrated London News, through the medium of engrav-
ings, provided visual commentary.
116 Global Expansion

21. One popular Sunday newspaper was even entitled Empire News.
22. Kipling was more than a vulgar imperial publicist (though he was certainly
that as well): he shows a keen appreciation of many of the contradictions
involved in exercising imperial authority on the ground.
23. I have been unable to locate the author or poem’s title, but the memory is a
vivid one from my schooldays.
24. The term itself was more commonly used by the French, but the concept was
general among the imperial powers.
25. In this his proposal was largely supported by advanced Indian opinion. As a
historian Macauley showed little interest in the empire.
26. They were answered, however, by a variety of progressive and liberal opinion,
notably John Stuart Mill. See, for example, John Saville and E.P. Thompson,
‘John Stuart Mill and EOKA’, New Reasoner 7, Winter 1958–59.
27. David Fieldhouse, ‘For Richer, for Poorer?’ in Stockwell (ed.), Cambridge Illus-
trated History of the British Empire, p.124.
28. In his State of the Union Address of 1870 President Grant looked forward
with enthusiasm to the total extirpation of the American Indians. Another
US President, Theodore Roosevelt, was to declare that a war against savages
was the most justified of all wars.
29. The leading Scottish daily papers, the Scotsman and Glasgow Herald, for ex-
ample, switched their politics from Liberal to Conservative.
30. A development assisted by the fact that no firearms restrictions existed before
1920.

Chapter 5. Imperial Relations

1. In absolute numbers, however, the figures are less impressive. Between 1876 and
1914 Canada received 1.5 million British immigrants, Australia and New Zealand
between them 800,000 and South Africa 136,000.
2. Particularly in relation to colonial tariffs – see below.
3. A.J. Stockwell comments on the contrast between the modest official residence
of the British prime minister and the intimidating magnificence of government
houses anywhere in the dependent empire, Cambridge Illustrated History of the
British Empire, p.166.
4. Tapan Raychaudhuri, ‘British Rule in India: An Assessment, in Stockwell (ed.),
Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire, p.360.
5. At the end of the twentieth century it is hard to appreciate how sensational
and revolutionary such a demand sounded at the time.
6. The question arises naturally as to why the European conquistadores both-
ered with such ‘treaties’. This perfunctory legalism, however, was essential to
avert possible objections in the home country to their activities and also as a
bargaining counter in relation to European rivals.
7. Stockwell, ‘Power, Authority and Freedom’, in Stockwell (ed.), Cambridge Il-
lustrated History of the British Empire, p.163.
8. The otherwise unimpressive colony of Aden had the inestimable merit of control-
ling the southern entrance to the Red Sea, as British-occupied Egypt did its north.
9. See V.G. Kiernan, ‘Empires and Umpires’, Socialist History 13, November 1998,
pp.1–4.
 Notes 117

10. The trend towards the growth during this period of huge monopoly con-
cerns and cartels was most marked in the USA and Germany; much less so in
Britain, though it was present there as well. The cartels might well cross na-
tional boundaries, as with the French and German steel industries, or, most
notoriously, the shipping conferences, which kept a tight grip on the interna-
tional carrying trade.
11. The nearest example was undoubtedly the USA.
12. For example, French peasants or Prussian Junkers.
13. The British government, however, borrowed heavily from the USA to finance
the Boer War, the first example of it undertaking extensive borrowing abroad.
It was an early sign of what was to become a central relationship in the later
twentieth century.
14. Though Malaya and the Middle East did become centrally important on ac-
count of their raw material output.
15. Those listed had pretensions to great power status. Portugal, though it had
an extensive colonial empire, did not.
16. See, for example, P.L. Payne, British Entrepreneurship in the Nineteenth Century,
Macmillan, 1974; Martin J. Weiner, English Culture and the Decline of the In-
dustrial Spirit 1850–1980, Penguin, 1985.
17. Williams, Made in Germany.
18. The German banking cartels were directly involved in industrial investment
to a much greater extent than those of other states.
19. Porter, European Imperialism, p.17.
20. See Fritz Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War.
21. The German strategists reckoned, however, that if continental control could be
secured, a direct confrontation with Britain itself might be made unnecessary.
22. This is not to ignore the fact that the German elite was itself internally divided
on the issue of world strategy and subject to conflicting pressures from patri-
otic mass organisations. See Geoff Eley, ‘Sammlungspolitik, Social Imperialism
and the Navy Law of 1898’, in his From Unification to Nazism: Reinterpreting
the German Past, Allen & Unwin, 1986.
23. For example, aggressive naval postures in Morocco and Venezuela and the
provocative (to the UK) naval expansion which the Reich undertook.
24. Not all cabinet members were admitted to the secret.
25. A publication by this lobby, C.S. Goldman (ed.), The Empire and the Century,
Charles Murray, 1906, speculates on the likelihood of the USA, Russia and
the British empire becoming the three world powers of the twentieth century –
or the danger of the USA alone becoming hegemonic, even over the UK; J.L.
Garvin, ‘The Maintenance of Empire’, in ibid., pp.69–143.
26. Quoted in Harry Browne, Joseph Chamberlain: Radical and Imperialist, Long-
man, 1974, pp.92–3.
27. Speeches in March and May 1903. Ibid pp. 94–6.
28. Quoted in P.J. Marshall, ‘1870–1918: The Empire under Threat’, in Stockwell
(ed.), Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire, p.59.
29. Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform: English Social-Imperial Thought
1895–1914, Allen & Unwin, 1960, pp.110–11.
30. In 1896 an Italian army was annihilated by the Ethiopians at Adowa, frus-
trating the attempt to make that country into an Italian colony. This worst
defeat ever suffered by Europeans in an African conflict was made possible by
118 Global Expansion

the supply of French armaments to the Ethiopians.

31. Cain and Hopkins note the irony that if the Chamberlainite campaign had
succeeded and Britain’s manufactured exports become more competitive it
could have damaged London’s position at the centre of the international
economy by forcing competitors who were also borrowers to reduce their prices,
accept lower profit margins, and thereby impair the ability to repay their debts,
British Imperialism, p.314.
32. The figure was 157 seats on the former government side, to 513 for the Liberal
coalition. The prime minister, Arthur Balfour, lost his own seat.
33. The Conservative Party conference had voted with Chamberlain. Balfour
commented that he would sooner take advice from his valet than from a
Conservative Conference. An empire trading bloc was eventually constructed
in 1932, but by then it was much too late to have any meaning in respect of
Chamberlain’s hopes.

Chapter 6. Significance of Empire

1. Reflected also in the fact that the most innovative and export-successful sec-
tor of British industry has been armaments production.
2. The case for the entrepreneurs’ defence can be summarised as follows: ‘… when
one attempts to understand the specific problems that were being encoun-
tered by industrial firms ... one can seldom fault the solution arrived at in the
light of the available information at the disposal of the entrepreneur or the
board at the time of the decision’. P.L. Payne, British Entrepreneurship in the
Nineteenth Century, Macmillan, 1974, p.58.
3. Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform, p.251.
4. Indicative is the notorious remark by Lord Curzon (who was actually by the
standards of imperial administrators a comparatively humane ruler), upon
seeing some British soldiers bathing, that he had not appreciated that the lower
classes had such white skins.
5. P.J. Marshall, ‘Imperial Britain’, in Stockwell (ed.), Cambridge Illustrated His-
tory of the British Empire, p.321.
6. Kiernan, Marxism and Imperialism, p.238.
7. Semmel, Marxism and Social Reform, p.170. Semmel comments, ‘Milner’s “no-
bler Socialism” was in conception little different from the “collectivism” of
the Fabians who considered the South African consul most worthy of their
praise.’
8. Kiernan, Marxism and Imperialism, p.247.
9. Semmel, Marxism and Social Reform, pp.114–15.
10. Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, vol. 2, The Pursuit of Power, Random House,
New York, 1989, p.44.
11. E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875–1914, p.72.
12. Ibid.
13. Kiernan, Marxism and Imperialism, p.43.
14. ‘After World War II, when Whitehall designed a new era of colonial rule, Brit-
ain aimed to reposition the empire in the Middle East and Africa’. Cain and
Hopkins, British Imperialism, p.421.
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Brewer, Ben, Marxist Theories of Imperialism, Rontledge and Kegan Paul, 1980.
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Cottrell, P.L., British Overseas Investment in the Nineteenth Century, Macmillan, 1975.
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Edwards, E.W., British Diplomacy and France in China 1895–1914, Clarendon, 1987.
Eldridge, C.C., Victorian Imperialism, Hodder & Stoughton, 1978.
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Appendix I – Maps

121
122 Global Expansion

Figure 1. The British Empire 1870–1914

Appendix I – Maps 123
124 Global Expansion

Figure 2. China: Leases and Concessions, c.1900

 Appendix I – Maps 125

Figure 3. Imperialism in Asia, c.1905

126 Global Expansion

Figure 4. Persia Partitioned, 1907

 Appendix I – Maps 127

Figure 5. Africa Partitioned, 1914

Appendix II – Tables

Table 1: Values of British trade with selected colonies and semi-colonies at 5-year
intervals (£m)

Africa Asia British N. India Australia Argentina

America
(excl. N.
Africa)
Imp Exp Imp Exp Imp Exp Imp Exp Imp Exp Imp Exp

1870 6.8 4.5 42.9 34.5 8.5 6.8 25.1 19.3 11.9 8.4 1.5 2.3
1875 8.6 7.4 56.0 41.0 10.2 9.0 30.1 24.2 17.1 15.6 1.4 2.4

1880 9.5 9.4 55.5 48.4 13.4 7.7 30.1 30.5 20.4 14.0 0.9 2.5
1885 7.3 6.7 53.1 46.0 10.3 7.2 31.9 29.3 18.1 21.2 1.9 4.7
1890 9.4 13.1 56.1 53.5 12.4 7.2 32.7 33.6 21.0 19.7 4.1 8.4

1895 9.0 14.7 43.5 42.3 13.4 5.5 26.4 24.8 25.0 14.2 9.1 5.4
1900 8.4 19.7 47.0 55.7 22.2 8.1 27.4 30.1 23.8 21.6 3.1 7.1
1905 11.3 25.3 56.5 78.8 26.2 12.3 36.1 43.0 27.0 17.0 25.0 13.0
1910 19.7 34.4 79.5 82.2 26.2 20.6 42.8 48.0 38.6 27.7 29.0 19.1

1913 22.9 38.6 92.6 125.7 31.5 24.7 48.4 70.3 38.1 34.5 42.5 22.6
By comparison, the respective figures for trade with the USA were:
1870 Imports 49.8, Exports 28.3

1914 Imports 141.7, Exports 29.3

Source: B.R. Mitchell and Phyllis Deane, Abstract of British Historical Statistics, Cambridge
University Press, 1971.

128
 Appendix II – Tables 129

Table 2: New British investment in selected regions at 5-year intervals (£m)

S. America Africa Asia Australasia Total British Empire

1870 4.1 2.2 7.1 2.5 9.9

1875 8.4 4.5 4.0 6.9 18.6

1880 3.1 2.7 3.2 11.7 18.7
1885 7.1 4.7 11.0 14.9 (1886 19. 4) 35.1

1890 23.3 (1889 40. 2) 4.6 10.8 12.8 28.6

1895 4.1 14.9 10.4 18.7 33.4
1900 6.9 7.2 11.9 6.9 25.7

1905 13.3 29.9 35.6 3.3 54.3

1910 39.6 16.3 32.9 6.9 81.3
1913 36.2 8.1 17.4 18.8 82.9

Note: The total British overseas investment in 1914 is estimated to have been approximately
£4,082,000,000 and the yearly dividend £200,000,000.

Source: A.R. Hall, The Export of Capital from Britain 1870–1914, Methuen, 1968.
130 Global Expansion

Table 3: British overseas investment 1865–1914 (%)

Destination
North America 34 Independent (incl. semi-colonies) 59
South America 17 Empire 40
Asia 14 Foreign dependencies 1
Europe 13
Australasia 11
Africa 11

Borrowers
Private 55
Governments 35
Mixed 10

Uses
Infrastructure 69
Extraction/Agriculture 12
Manufacturing 4
Other 15

Sourse: A.R. Hall, The Export of Capital from Britain 1870–1914, Methuen, 1968.
 Appendix II – Tables 131

Table 4: Imperial Military Forces 1903 (round figures)

North America 34,000

Australia 21,000
New Zealand 15,000
Africa 42,000
India and Burma 410,000
UK 853,000
Others 17,000
Total 1,392,000

Source: C.S. Goldman (ed.), The Empire and the Century, John Murray, 1905.
Index

Aborigines’ Protection Society 107 Chartists 18, 21, 71

Africa x, 24–5, 30–44, 83ff, see also Chile 53–4
individual African regions China 8, 47–51, 57, 61, 65, 67, 90
Alfred, King 28 Boxer Rising in 48, 50
Arabia 86 Chomsky, Noam xi
Arabian/Persian Gulf 87 Church of Scotland 35
Argentina 53 Clark, Alan xi
Arrighi, Giovanni x Cobden, Richard 16
Ashanti 84 Coefficient Club 106
Asquith, H.H. 77 Columbus, Christopher (Cristobal
Attlee, Clement 109 Colomb) 4
Australia, Australasia 8, 15, 23, 62, Colonial Office 81
68–9, 80, 81 Congo 41–2, 75, 107
Conrad, Joseph 1
Baganda 84 Conservative Party 26–9, 74, 77, 95,
Baring, Evelyn (Lord Cromer) 32, 65 109
Bartlett, Robert 3 Corradini, Enrico 99
Belfast 76
Beloff, Max xi Dickens, Charles 75
Berlin Conference (1885) 41–2 Dilke, Sir Charles 25
Birmingham 95, 98 Disraeli, Benjamin 26–8, 32, 104
Bismarck, Otto von 91, 97 Dundee 22, 45
Blunt, Wilfred Scawen 107 Dutch East Indies 51–2
Boers, Boer War (South African
War) 43, 61, 63, 70, 78, 96, 108 East India Company 8, 18–9, 24, 34,
Boy Scouts 73, 97 47, 83
Brazil 53–4 Egypt 31–2, 34, 61, 65–6, 67, 84, 87
British South Africa Company and ‘Denshawni Horror’ 65–6, 106
(BSAC) 34, 37–7, 39, 84
Burma 19, 52 Fabian Society 106–7
Falklands War 109, 113n.
Cain, P.J. 11 Fascism 109
Canada 8, 15, 45, 80 Ferguson, Niall xi
Cann, John xi Fieldhouse, D.K. 11
Capital export 9ff, 17, 22, 67, 89–91, Free Church of Scotland 35
102–3 Free trade 8, 16–7, 19, 31, 79, 81, 87,
Cape Colony 8, 31, 36 94ff
Carlyle, Thomas 75 Frere, Sir Bartle 25–6, 35, 46, 73
Casement, Sir Roger 107 Froude, J.A. 75
Caste system 72
Chamberlain, Joseph 18, 39 Gallagher, J. 11
and imperial unity 94–9, 104, 109 Gandhi, M.K. 83
Charmley, John xi Germany 12,

132
 Index 133

rivalry with British empire 91ff Kitchener, General 33, 84

German East Africa (Tanganyka) 37
Geiss, Immanuel 92 Labour movements xii, 11, 13, 20,
Gladstone, William 32, 34, 95 23, 25, 105ff
Glasgow 6, 26, 38 Latin America 15, 20, 32, 53–5, 57,
Gold Coast (Ghana) 67, 85 63, 67, 90, 107, see also individual
Goldie, Sir George 38 states
Gordon, General 32–3, 34 Lenin, V.I. ix, x, 10–11, 93, 102–3,
Great Victorian Depression 10, 89 103, 108
Leopold II, Belgian King 34, 42, 89
Halevy, Elie xii, Liberal Party 27, 76, 95, 100
Hardie, Keir 106 Liberal imperialism 99–100
Hargreaves, John D. x, Liberal Unionist Party 95
Hegel, G.W.F. 106 Liverpool 6, 25, 38
Hewins, W.A.S. 106 Livingstone, David 26, 35, 72
Hitler, Adolf xi Lobengula 37
Hobsbawm, Eric 9, 31 Lugard, Frederick 85–6
Hobson, J.A. 103, 107–8
Hong Kong 15, 19, 48, 65 Mackay, James 46
Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank 48, Macaulay, Thomas Babington 75
49, 56 Mackinnon, William 34–5, 45
Hopkins, A.G. 11 Malay peninsula 15, 52, 69, 86, 87
Hyndman, H.M. 107 Manchester 42, 45
Marchand, Colonel 33
Imperial British East Africa Company Marx, 6, 16, 18,
(Ibea) 34–5, 46 ‘Matabeleland’ (Rhodesia) 36–7, 84, 85
Imperial ideology 71–6, 94ff, 104ff. Milner, Alfred 97
Indentured labour 63, 65, 68–9, 97, Morel, E.D. 107
115n. Mosley, Oswald 104
India 8, 18–9, 24, 45–6, 57, 82–3, Mussolini, Benito 99
105, 108, 109
Indian National Congress 8 Napier, Sir Charles 18–9
‘Mutiny’ 75, 83 National Service League 97
Princely States’ 64, 83 Navy League 97
Industrial Revolution 6, 7ff., 15, 88, Niger, Nigeria 25, 37–9, 67, 85–6
103 110n. Normans 3
‘Second Industrial Revolution’ 9ff North Borneo 52, 87
‘Internal colonialism’ 3 North Atlantic economy 5,
Ireland 4, 76, 95, 107, 108 Nyasaland (Malawi) 36
Italian imperialism 99
O’Brien, P. 11
Jamaica insurrection 75 Offer, A. 11
Japan 51, 57, 61, 80 Opium, Opium Wars 8, 19, 24, 47
Jardine Matheson & Co. 48, 49, 56 Orange Free State 36, 42–3

Kafka, Franz 1 P&O shipping line 49

Kenya 35, 67, 68, 85, 105 Pacific islands 52
Kiernan, Victor 43, 82, 106 Palmerston, Lord 21, 28, 71
Kipling, Rudyard 74, 75 Persian empire 15, 58, 93
134 Global Expansion

Platt, D.C.M 11 Stanley, H.M. 26, 42

Porter, Andrew ix, Stephen, James 18
Sudan 32–3, 84
Railways 17, 22 Suez Canal 31–2, 87, 92
‘Regimes of accumulation’ 6–7
Rhodes, Cecil 36–7, 39, 43, 66, 80 Tariff Reform project 94ff, 106
Roberts, Field-Marshal 97
Robinson, R. 11 Third Reich xii, 12
Round Table 97 Thompson, E.P. 20
Royal Niger Company (RNC) 34, Transvaal 36, 37, 42–3
38–9, 67, 73, 84 Turkish (Ottoman) empire 15, 20,
Rudd, Charles 37, 39 30, 32, 49, 55–6, 59, 84, 92, 93
Russian Revolution 83, 108
Uganda 35, 68
Salisbury, Lord 24, 44, 94 Unilever 39
Sati (suttee) 72
Second Reform Act 21, 27 Victoria, Queen 28, 74
Semmel, Bernard 104, 106 Diamond Jubilee of 95
Settlement colonies 18, 21–3, 57, 62– Yuan Shih-K’ai 51
3, 79–81, 95
Shaw, George Bernard 65, 106, 107 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon 18
Sheffield 45 Webb, Sydney and Beatrice 106
Sierra Leone 72 West Indies 8, 15, 24, 68,
Singapore 87 World War I viii, ix, 11, 12, 40, 56,
Slave trade, slavery xii, 5, 6, 7, 25–6, 59, 76, 79, 83, 84, 93, 103, 108
30, 37, 53, 62, 72, 73, 75 World War II 109
Smith, Adam 87
Social Democratic Federation 107 Xhosa 26
South Africa 23, 62, 67, 78, 105
Cape Colony 15, 36, Zanzibar 25–6, 35, 73
Natal 68–9 Zulus 26