THE EMPIRE

PROJECT
The Rise and Fall of the
British World-System, 1830–1970

John Darwin
 CONTENTS

List of maps page ix

Preface and acknowledgments xi

Introduction: the project of an Empire 1

Part I Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’: the

elements of Empire in the long nineteenth century

1 Victorian origins 23

2 The octopus power 64

3 The commercial republic 112

4 The Britannic experiment 144

5 ‘Un-British rule’ in ‘Anglo-India’ 180

6 The weakest link: Britain in South Africa 217

7 The Edwardian transition 255

Part II ‘The great liner is sinking’: the British

world-system in the age of war

8 The war for Empire, 1914–1919 305

9 Making imperial peace, 1919–1926 359

10 Holding the centre, 1927–1937 418

11 The strategic abyss, 1937–1942 476

12 The price of survival, 1943–1951 514

 viii / Contents

13 The third world power, 1951–1959 566

14 Reluctant retreat, 1959–1968 610

Conclusion 649

Notes 656
Select bibliography 789
Index 795
 INTRODUCTION: THE PROJECT
OF AN EMPIRE
For more than a century after c.1840, the British Empire formed the
core of a larger British ‘world-system’ managed from London. This
book is a study of the rise, fortunes and fall of that system.
The British world-system was not a structure of global hege-
mony, holding in thrall the non-Western world. Except in particular
places and at particular times, such hegemonic authority eluded all
British leaders from Lord Palmerston to Churchill. But the British
‘system’ (a term that contemporaries sometimes made use of) was
much more than a ‘formal’ territorial empire, and certainly global
in span. It embraced an extraordinary range of constitutional, diplo-
matic, political, commercial and cultural relationships. It contained
colonies of rule (including the huge ‘sub-empire’ of India), settlement
colonies (mostly self-governing by the late nineteenth century), pro-
tectorates, condominia (like the Sudan), mandates (after 1920), naval
and military fortresses (like Gibraltar and Malta), ‘occupations’ (like
Egypt and Cyprus), treaty-ports and ‘concessions’ (Shanghai was the
most famous), ‘informal’ colonies of commercial pre-eminence (like
Argentina), ‘spheres of interference’ (a useful term coined by Sellars
and Yeatman) like Iran, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf, and (not
least) a rebellious province at home. There was no agreed term for this
far-flung conglomerate. This may have been why contemporaries some-
times found it convenient to fall back on that protean phrase ‘the Pax
Britannica’ once it came into use after 1880,1 as if the ‘British Peace’
formed a geographical zone.
But, if they found it hard to label this web of British connec-
tions with any precision, contemporaries grasped nonetheless that it
 2 / Introduction: the project of an Empire

formed the real source of British world power. In retrospect, we can see
that, by the 1840s at latest, the British system was becoming global in
three different senses. First, it exerted its presence, commercial or mil-
itary, in every world region from treaty-port China and the maritime
East Indies, through Burma, South Asia, the Persian Gulf, Zanzibar
and West Africa, to the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the River Plate
republics, and as far as the Pacific coast of North America, the future
‘British’ Columbia. Secondly, however clumsy its methods, the point
of the system was to promote the integration of these widely separated
places: commercially, strategically, politically and – by diffusing British
beliefs and ideas – culturally as well. Shared political values, recognis-
ably similar institutions and laws, mutual economic dependence, and
common protection against external attack by European rivals or preda-
tory locals, were meant to achieve this for regions and states whether
outside or inside the British domain in the constitutional sense. Thirdly,
although this aspect was hard to see at the time, the success and survival
of British connections depended on something far vaster than the tactics
and stratagems of British agents and interests. Economic and political
change in Asia, the Qing crisis in China, the geopolitical shape of post-
Bonaparte Europe, the unexpected success of the settler republic on the
American continent, patterns of consumption, religious renewals and
the movements of peoples in migrations and diasporas: all these (and
more) opened the way for British expansion, and widened the scope of
British connections – but prescribed both their limits and their duration
in time. If the British system was global, its fate was a function of the
global economy and of shifts in world politics which it might hope to
influence but could hardly control.
But was it really a ‘system’? There are good grounds for thinking
that the British empire of rule, let alone its self-governing or ‘informal’
outriders, had no logic at all. It looked like the booty of an obsessive
collector whose passions had come with a rush and then gone with the
wind, to be replaced in their turn by still more transient interests. The
result was a pile of possessions whose purpose or meaning was long
since forgotten, half-opened packets of quickly waning appeal, and new
acquisitions made on the spur of the moment. It was certainly true that
by the mid-nineteenth century the West Indian colonies, once the jewel
in their crown, seemed to most British observers a troublesome burden,
tainted by slavery, ill-governed and impoverished. The small enclaves
of rule on the coast of West Africa had an even worse reputation.
 3 / Introduction: the project of an Empire

London regretted the effort to rule the Southern African interior, and
had handed it over to the Boer republics by the mid-1850s. It was
also the case that British expansion had no master-plan. It had almost
always been true that colonial schemes or their commercial equivalents
were devised not by governments but by private enthusiasts in search of
wealth, virtue or religious redemption. Sometimes they dragged White-
hall in their wake, to get its protection, secure a monopoly or obtain
a licence to rule through a charter or patent. By ‘insider-dealing’ in
the political world, they might conscript Whitehall’s resources for their
colony-building. Sometimes Whitehall insisted on an imperial claim on
its soldiers’ or sailors’ advice, or to appease a popular outcry. But,
once entrenched at their beachhead, the ‘men on the spot’ were hard
to restrain, awkward to manage and impossible to abandon. The result
could be seen from the map. The huge swathes of territory scattered
all over the globe, whose defence, so it seemed to some late Victorians,
was little short of a nightmare.
This is a useful corrective to paying too much attention to the
mood of the ‘policy-makers’, to invoking too often the cool rationality
(or constant viewpoint) of the ‘official mind’, or to being over-impressed
by the so-called ‘reluctance’ of British imperialism. British expansion
was driven not by official designs but by the chaotic pluralism of
British interests at home and of their agents and allies abroad. The
result (by the mid-nineteenth century) was an empire of beachheads
and bridgeheads, half-conquered tracts, half-settled interiors, mission-
stations and whaling-stations, barracks and cantonments, treaty-ports
on the up (Shanghai was the best) and treaty-ports with no future.
Its mid-Victorian critics were appalled by its moral and physical
cost, and convinced of its commercial and political futility. However,
the argument of this book is that, while imposing a system on this
chaotic expansion was beyond the power of the imperial government in
London, a system emerged nonetheless.
The characteristic of a system is the inter-dependence of its
parts, on each other or with the centre of the system, and, as the system
develops, the assumption by each of a specific function or role. In
the British case, the most obvious forms of such inter-dependence were
naval and military. This was not simply a matter of depending on Britain
for strategic defence or for military aid in a localised struggle. British
ability to provide naval protection or to send reinforcements to the
scene of a conflict would have been very limited without the resources
 4 / Introduction: the project of an Empire

the imperial system supplied. It was strategic control of the Cape Colony
(whose economic value was derisory before 1870) that secured the naval
gateway to Asia from European waters. The prime function of Egypt,
occupied by the British in 1882, was to preserve British use of the Suez
Canal and protect the ‘Clapham Junction’ of imperial communications.
Malta, Aden, Ceylon, Singapore, Hong Kong, Esquimalt (on Vancouver
Island), the Falklands and Halifax, Nova Scotia, formed the network of
bases from which the Royal Navy patrolled the world’s sea-lanes. India
played several roles in the British world-system, but perhaps its critical
function was to be the main base from which British interests in Asia
could be advanced and defended. Indian soldiers and a British garrison
paid for by Indian revenues were the ‘strategic reserve’ of the British
system in Asia. Because India played this role, other British possessions
and spheres east and south of Suez were largely exempted from the costs
of defence – a fact of crucial importance to their economic viability.
Commercially, too, this systemic inter-dependence became
more and more striking. Both colonial territories and ‘informal’ colonies
had to compete for investment and credits from London to expand their
economies. They had to find and meet an external demand to earn the
overseas income to fund their borrowing needs. They had to produce
the specialised exports (staples) that would command the best price in
London’s commodity markets. In return, with the grand exception of
the United States (which had received one-fifth of British foreign invest-
ment by 1913), British capital was shuttled by the City of London
between the various sectors of its commercial empire (a vast global
realm among whose key provinces were Canada, Argentina, India,
Australia, Southern Africa, China and the Middle East), employing
a calculus of prospective return and speculative gain.2
Demographically, also, there were strong systemic influences at
work. Britain was the reservoir. Although two-thirds of British migrants
went to the United States up until 1900, almost all the rest were dis-
tributed between the four main settlement zones of Canada, Australia,
New Zealand and South Africa. Indeed, their economic development
was usually seen as being closely dependent upon drawing labour and
skills from the British supply (South Africa was a partial exception to
this rule). In British opinion, the value of migration in creating overseas
markets, relieving domestic distress and creating ‘Arcadias’ free from
industrialism, turned the emigrant flow into a form of social renewal
and the settlement colonies into prospective ‘new Britains’. Nor was
 5 / Introduction: the project of an Empire

‘old’ Britain the only well-spring of migration. Between 1834 and 1937,
India exported some 30 million people to other British possessions as
indentured labour, and perhaps one-fifth remained as permanent set-
tlers. In the tropical empire (which British migrants avoided) they sup-
plied much of the labour and business expertise to promote commercial
expansion.
Lastly, the spheres of British expansion were progressively
linked by a complex system of communication. From the 1840s
onwards, this was provided by subsidised mail services, telegraph wires,
undersea cables, an expanding rail network, fast passenger steamers
and (in the twentieth century) imperial air routes. They catered for, and
stimulated, the growing volume and frequency of the traffic in news,
information, private correspondence, personnel and ideas that flowed
between Britain and other parts of the system, as well as between those
constituent parts. By the late nineteenth century, it has been persuasively
argued, an ‘imperial press system’ had come into being.3 It supplied
London with news as well as buying it back from London-based agen-
cies (a perfect feedback loop), a process accompanied by the circulation
of journalists and the diffusion of newspaper practice. The supply of
magazines, newspapers and books from Britain was supplemented by
a small outward phalanx of teachers, academics and scientific experts.
‘Imperial’ associations sprang up to pool the experience of businessmen,
doctors, surveyors, engineers, foresters, agronomists, teachers and jour-
nalists. To an extent we are gradually beginning to notice, the return
flows of experience, scientific information and academic talent exerted
a powerful influence upon elite culture in Britain.
None of this is to argue that the British world-system was closed
or exclusive, let alone self-sufficient. The reverse was the case. Its geopo-
litical equilibrium required quite specific conditions: a ‘passive’ East
Asia, a European balance, and a strong but unaggressive United States.
If those conditions broke down, the imperial archipelago, strung across
the world, would soon start to look fragile. British elites – in Canada,
Australasia and India as well as in Britain itself – were well aware of this
frailty, and more and more so after 1900. Secondly, the British system
was also highly exposed to the global economy that took shape with
astonishing speed between 1870 and 1914. Britain’s overseas earn-
ings derived partly at least from carrying and financing the trade of
third parties, brokered through London. The circuit of payments that
allowed the huge growth of trade within the British world-system was
 6 / Introduction: the project of an Empire

multilateral in scope.4 India’s deficit with Britain was met by the pro-
ceeds of its exports to Europe and the United States. Canada paid its
American deficit from its surplus with Britain. One-third of British trade
was with European markets and suppliers. Although there was room
for debate about what level of protection (if any) would secure the
best terms of trade for Britain and its system against the rest of the
world, an open global economy not a set of ‘mercantilist’ blocs seemed
the economic corollary of the British system’s survival for most of the
century after 1840. Thirdly, while the British system promoted certain
cultural affinities (most strongly between its English-speaking commu-
nities) and proclaimed a liberal ideology (in practice applied by author-
itarian means in India and elsewhere in the tropical empire), it was
not a closed cultural world. Its external borders were easily permeable,
and open to influences from America, Europe and Russia (after 1917),
from the intellectual heartlands of the Islamic world, and even from
China and Japan (whose revolt against the West was much admired by
Gandhi). Internally, too, ‘British’ culture coexisted uneasily with indige-
nous cultures and those of non-British settlers. By the late nineteenth
century, it faced strong cultural movements in India, forms of cultural
nationalism in French Canada, Ireland and among the Cape Afrikan-
ers, and was feebly equipped to attempt a cultural ‘mission’ among its
new African subjects. The angry assertiveness of some British cultural
‘messengers’ and their periodic fits of despondency reflected not their
calm superiority (as is sometimes assumed) but a mood often closer to
a siege mentality.
A history of the British world-system must take account of
these facts. First, British possessions (coloured red on the map) may
loom large in the story, but only as parts of the larger conglomerate.
Secondly, while the political, economic and cultural history of different
colonial (and semi-colonial) territories can be studied up to a point as
a local affair, the links between them and other parts of the system
exerted a critical if variable influence on their politics, economics and
culture. The limits of British concession to Indian nationalism would
be inexplicable without the fact of India’s contribution to ‘imperial
defence’, just as the goals of the pre-1914 Congress make little sense
except as a claim to be treated on terms of equality with the ‘white
dominions’ of the ‘British world’. Canada’s extraordinary commitment
of men in two world wars – the greatest traumas of its twentieth-century
history – derived fundamentally from a sense of its shared identity as
 7 / Introduction: the project of an Empire

a ‘British nation’. The survival of Afrikanerdom in South Africa – the

central fact of its twentieth-century history – was the prize for success
in fighting the British to a virtual stalemate in 1899–1902, exploiting
their fear (as Smuts had foreseen) that keeping their army too long on
the veld would endanger too many vital interests elsewhere. Only the
parochialism of most British historians has veiled the pervasive effects
of Britain’s external connections on its institutions and outlook: the
huge migrant flows, the vast overseas wealth, the ‘imperial’ monarchy,
the cultural confidence bred by the sense of enduring ‘centrality’ in
a globalised world. Thirdly, ‘British connections’ were dynamic not
static. Their strength and solidity at any particular time were powerfully
(perhaps decisively) shaped by the play of economic and geopolitical
forces at the global not just imperial level.
But how to write such a history? It plainly cannot be done as
a series of parallel histories of regions and colonies, whose distinctive
development and ultimate separation form the Leitmotif of their story.
This is the ‘nationalist’ historiography in which ‘British connection’ is
an alien force, and a barrier to nationhood with all that it promised. In
‘national’ histories, links forged by migrations and the flows of goods
and ideas retreat to the margins, or form the static backdrop to the
national ‘project’. But nor can it be done as a grandiose study in ‘impe-
rial policy’, as if decisions taken in Whitehall, and the thinking behind
them, were the dominant force in the fate of the system. Quite apart
from the limits to imperial authority imposed by local conditions and
external pressures, the ‘policy-makers’ rarely had a free rein to decide
what British (or imperial) interests were, let alone how to preserve
them. Least of all will it help to fall back upon a crude stereotyping
of conflicting ‘imaginaries’, in which ‘British’ conceptions of mastery
are contrasted with the values of their indigenous subjects. Although
their widely different assumptions about race, gender and class shaped
the British connection with almost every part of the world, there was
no single pattern of ‘hegemonic’ assertion and local response. British
opinions were not monolithic (since Britain was a complex and plural-
istic society) and changed over time. The same could be said of almost
every society into which British influence was inserted. Most important
of all, discerning the impact of ‘imaginings’, ‘representations’ or ‘colo-
nial knowledge’ requires something more than a sampling of texts: the
careful reconstruction of economic and political contexts must be the
starting point of enquiry.
 8 / Introduction: the project of an Empire

Even a book as lengthy as this one could not hope to do justice

to the multiple threads that bound different places to Britain and to
other parts of its system. Instead, its main focus is upon what might be
called ‘imperial politics’: the almost continual debate over the terms of
association by which the various member states (including Britain itself)
were bound to the British system. This was not simply the question of
whether some form of independence was preferable – for most of the
time, this was hardly practical politics. It was more often a matter of
the limits of local autonomy; of how far British values (especially rep-
resentative government) were being respected in practice (a key issue in
India); of what place in the system colonial states should aspire to; how
much influence they should wield over the general direction of policy
(especially in matters of external defence); and whether the benefits and
burdens of empire were being shared fairly between them. Politicians
in states like Argentina or Egypt, without formal ties to the Empire,
but with no means of escape from the British embrace, faced much the
same issues. So in their own way did political leaders in Britain, which,
together with India, met the main costs of imperial defence. Of course,
this debate was not only conducted between organs of colonial and
British opinion, or between colonial spokesmen and imperial official-
dom. It divided parties and factions in each member territory where
religion, ethnicity and regional interests, as well as private ambition,
helped determine the outcome.
The theme of this book, then, is the continuous interplay of
two sorts of tensions. The first was internal: the chronic disagreements
over how the British system should work, usually expressed as political
conflict over the connection with Britain or ‘British connection’. The
second was external. The meaning of ‘British connection’ – its prestige
and appeal, its perceived costs and benefits – was pulled this way and
that by the ‘exogenous’ forces of the global environment. The unpre-
dictable shifts in the shape of world politics; geopolitical change and
the rise of new powers; boom, bubble and bust in the global econ-
omy; the unforeseen impact of ideological movements and their conta-
gious appeal: their collective effect was to create an ‘external’ arena of
extraordinary turbulence before 1900, and of volcano-like chaos in the
twentieth century. On their rollercoaster ride through modern world
history, the most powerful units of the British world system were at
times flung together by centripetal attraction, at times sucked apart as
if about to spin off into separate trajectories. We know of course that,
 9 / Introduction: the project of an Empire

in the great crisis of empire in 1940–2, the system all but broke up and
never fully recovered. But, up until then, it had seemed axiomatic that,
in one form or another, with more local freedom or less, the bond of
empire would hold and the system endure.
What then were the system’s most powerful components whose
adhesion mattered most to its chance of survival? The most important
by far was the imperial centre: the British Isles, yoked together for most
of the period in a British ‘Union’ or by the ‘dominion’ relationship with
Southern Ireland between 1921 and 1948. This composite ‘Britain’
(more often called ‘England’ after its dominant element) supplied much
of the energy that the system demanded. Its huge financial resources,
vast manufacturing output and enormous coal reserves (its so-called
‘Black Indies’ of a thousand coalfields)5 made Britain a commercial
and industrial titan, whose principal rivals, the United States and
Germany, engaged much less in trade or traded mainly with Europe.
Even by the late 1880s, Britain disposed of more (steam) horsepower per
head than any other state, including the United States.6 Its large surplus
of manpower (the product of birth-rate and prevailing social condi-
tions) fuelled Britain’s ‘demographic imperialism’, the human capacity
to stock the settlement colonies and maintain their British complex-
ion, despite a much larger migrant stream to the United States. Britain
was also at all times a great power in Europe, and able to use its
leverage there as part of the general defence of its interests worldwide.
The great strategic bonus of this European role, until the inter-war
years, was that the main source of its power in European politics, the
world’s largest deep-sea navy, could also be used to uphold the oceanic
supremacy first grasped at Trafalgar in 1805. Britain also possessed a
set of cultural assets whose value is harder to quantify but is of crucial
importance. In their institutional form, these were the clubs and soci-
eties, associations and leagues, patrons, sponsors and churches (as well
as government agencies) through whom information and knowledge of
the world beyond Europe was collected, collated, digested and diffused
to the public at large or to a more privileged few. Not the least of the
attributes that Britain contributed to the overall strength of its system
was as a great cultural entrepot.
In the world east of Suez, the indispensable element in British
world power was India. Imperial India was more than the countries of
modern ‘South Asia’. It was ‘Greater India’: a ‘sub-empire’ ruled from
Calcutta (and Simla), extending from Aden to Burma, and with its own
 10 / Introduction: the project of an Empire

sphere of influence in the Persian Gulf, Southwest Iran, Afghanistan and

(for some of the time) Tibet. ‘Greater India’ might even include coastal
East Africa, whose metropole was Bombay until the late nineteenth
century, and the ‘Straits Settlements’ of the Malayan peninsula, ruled
from Calcutta into the late 1860s. The agrarian revenues of the Indian
‘heartland’ paid for a British-officered Indian army and after 1860 for
a large British garrison, between a third and a half of Britain’s regular
army. Of the peace-time strength of the British and Indian armies –
together almost the whole regular land force of the British world-
system – the Indian taxpayer paid for nearly two-thirds. India’s internal
market, pegged open by rule, and its return on investment, underwrit-
ten by government, was a major contributor to British employment
(India was the largest market for Britain’s principal export) and to
Britain’s balance of payments. India’s ports and railways (the largest
network outside the West), its merchants, migrants and labourers, its
British-owned banks and agency-houses, and its strategic position on
the marine trunk road to East Asia, made up the engine of Anglo-Indian
expansion, an enterprise under both British and Indian management.
By the late nineteenth century, it was hard to imagine how this intri-
cate fusion of British and Indian interests could be prised apart without
disaster for both.
The third great component of the British world-system was not
territorial. It might almost be thought of as a ‘virtual India’: a vast
abstract realm of assets and interests. This was the hinterland of the
City of London, a ‘commercial republic’ bound together by self-interest
not rule, but containing within it a fast-growing ‘empire’ of British-
owned property. The jewel in the crown of this empire of commerce
was the deep-sea merchant marine, much of it serving non-British cus-
tomers, but earning a huge income remitted to its owners at home. It
was closely paralleled by British-owned railways: like the Great Indian
Peninsular and the East Indian Railway, the Canadian Pacific Rail-
way, the Great Southern Railway in Argentina, or the humbler ‘Simon
Bolivar’ in Northern Venezuela. Banks and insurance companies, ship-
ping agents and packers, and a mass of installations including utilities,
harbour-works, telegraph companies (like the globe-spanning ‘Great
Eastern’), plantations, mines, and concessions for oil, also helped to
ensure that the profits Britain drew from the growth of world trade were
second to none. By the 1890s, the income that was drawn from these
overseas assets and the invisible income from shipping and services was
 11 / Introduction: the project of an Empire

equivalent to between 70 and 80 per cent of the earnings from Britain’s

domestic (merchandise) exports (in 1960, by contrast, Britain’s net
invisible income was much less than one-twentieth of the earnings from
exports). They more than covered the payment gap between British
exports and imports (the remotest of dreams in 1960) protected the
value of sterling, and built up the ‘war-chest’ of overseas assets on
which British governments drew deeply in both world wars.
The fourth component was the ‘awkward squad’ of self-
governing settlement colonies, called ‘dominions’ after 1907, or, col-
loquially, ‘the white dominions’. It was a disparate group that com-
prised Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa (after union
in 1910), Newfoundland (whose bankruptcy brought rule by a British
commission from 1933 until 1949, when it became a province of
Canada), the Irish Free State (from 1921 until 1948 when it became
a republic and left the Commonwealth) and Southern Rhodesia
(which, after 1923, enjoyed dominion-like status, but without full
self-government). To the French Canadian minority, the Afrikaner
majority among South African whites, and, in the Irish Free State,
loyalty to the ‘British connection’, was at best conditional, at worst
non-existent. But, among the ethnic British majorities in Canada,
Australia, New Zealand and Newfoundland, and the large ‘English’
minority among South African whites, a sense of shared British iden-
tity (to be sharply distinguished from any subservience to Britain) was
deeply ingrained. Dominion politicians declared over and over again
that Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Newfoundland were ‘British
countries’, or ‘British nations’. To them and their constituents (since
this was a popular not an elite point of view), the ‘Empire’ was not
an alien overlord, but a joint enterprise in which they were, or claimed
to be, partners. It was not so much England as the Empire for which
they were fighting, said Milner in 1917.7 Its interests were – or ought
to be – theirs. The Whitehall officials who dealt with these ‘colonial’
leaders found them prickly and unyielding, and took their revenge in
disparaging minutes. In fact, the dominions were a critical element in
British world power. The remarkable loyalty of the ‘overseas British’
and their economic efficiency made them the most reliable overseas
part of the whole British world-system, contributing a million men for
military service in the First World War (as many as India), and more
in the Second, as well as (from Canada especially) vital industrial and
financial resources.
 12 / Introduction: the project of an Empire

British world power, to put the matter more starkly, required

the cooperation of each of these elements and the resources they
offered – material and psychological. When they fell away, collapsed
or seceded (as largely happened between 1940 and 1947), that world
power soon ended. Three further points, however, need to be made.
The first is that those long-favoured categories of ‘imperialism’ and
‘nationalism’ as the binary opposites of imperial history are of limited
value in making sense of this story. In much of their overseas system,
the British could make little use (even if they wanted to) of coercive
methods or authoritarian rule. Among those British ‘imperialists’ for
whom ‘closer union’ with the settlement colonies was the greatest prior-
ity, sharing London’s command of foreign affairs and defence through
a federal system was the favoured solution. Secondly, although ‘nation-
alist’ histories make much of resistance, and eagerly trace the genealogy
of independence movements back to the earliest phases of colonial rule,
most of those who were politically active in colonial societies were far
more ambivalent. For some, foreign rule had been a political and cul-
tural bonanza, displacing the power of groups they disliked more. Thus
many Bengali Hindus felt liberated from the Muslim regime that Clive
had defeated. For others, nationalist activity was primarily ‘tactical’ –
to obtain specific concessions – not ‘strategic’ – to forge a separate
sovereign state. Nor is this surprising. For the third point to make is
that, until very late in the day (the early 1940s is the likeliest time),
it seemed wisest to assume that British world power would remain
exceptionally formidable, that escape from its orbit would be excep-
tionally difficult, and that, in a world of predatory powers, the imperial
frying-pan was not the worst place to be. It was much more realistic
to seek the widest autonomy that the British system had to offer than
to strive for the grail of an unimaginable sovereignty. With the excep-
tion of Jawaharlal Nehru, who dreamt of a Marxist millennium, and
of Subhas Chandra Bose, the Indian nationalist leadership of the 1920s
and 1930s showed an indifference to the international scene that seems
amazing in retrospect.

What difference does it make to the history of British imperialism if we

approach it in the way that has just been sketched out? The argument
 13 / Introduction: the project of an Empire

here is that we can take a more realistic view of Britain’s imperial power
if we keep its main elements in a single field of action. That might also
lead us towards somewhat different conclusions on at least five aspects
of the imperial past.
First, it might allow us to see more clearly than before that
Britain’s place in the world was not simply a consequence of Britain’s
‘own’ power and its ability to impose it wholesale on the rest of the
globe. Instead, the key to British power lay in combining the strength
of its overseas components with that of the imperial centre, and man-
aging them – not commanding them – through the various linkages of
‘imperial politics’: some persuasive, some coercive, some official, some
unofficial. Stripped of those assets that lay outside the direct control
of the administrators in Whitehall, British power in the world would
have been feeble indeed. The rest depended upon the willingness of
political and business elites in different parts of the world to acknowl-
edge the benefits that membership of the British system conferred, and
concede – sometimes grudgingly – that its various costs were worth-
while. Of course, that willingness was bound to depend upon the gen-
eral equilibrium of the whole British system, and Britain’s ability to
meet its large share of the overall burden.
Secondly, adopting this view allows us to form a clearer impres-
sion of the actual trajectory of British world power, both its rise and
its decline. In one school of thought, British world power performed
a long diminuendo from its brief mid-Victorian triumph.8 In another,
the Edwardian era saw the last fading chance to stave off decline, but
one thrown away by the weakness or blindness of the ‘weary Titan’s’
own political leaders.9 A third proclaims that British power reached its
apogee in the inter-war years.10 A fourth was that the gradual decline
of those years was briefly reversed in the Second World War before a
final sudden descent.11 A fifth was that the British clung on by hook or
by crook until the final surrender of their ‘role’ east of Suez in the late
1960s. Each case has its merits. But, if we ask when each part of the
British system could contribute the most to its overall power, it seems
clear that neither the ‘white dominions’ nor the mercantile and property
empire over which the City presided counted for much before the later
nineteenth century, and that the contribution of India, in economic and
military terms, also rose in that period. By the inter-war years, in a
much harsher environment, there were clear signs of strain, alleviated
in part by the weakness of Britain’s main rivals until very late in the
 14 / Introduction: the project of an Empire

day. But the real turning point came with the strategic catastrophe of
1940–2. Britain’s drastic defeat as a European power, the forced liqui-
dation of the most valuable parts of its property empire, the lapse of its
claim to the (more or less) unconditional loyalty of the overseas domin-
ions, and the irrecoverable offer of independence to India to meet the
desperate emergency of 1942, marked the practical end of the British
system created in the mid-nineteenth century. That empire that hung on
after 1945 was built from different (and much more fragile) materials.
It relied far more than before upon the efforts of Britain itself, not least
the diverting of so much of its manpower into a conscript army and
the arduous struggle to earn more from merchandise exports than ever
before. It also imposed new burdens on the least-developed parts of the
pre-war system. Above all, it depended upon the goodwill and assis-
tance of a far stronger world power, less and less willing to concede
even the shadow of parity to its debilitated partner.
Thirdly, a ‘systemic’ view of British imperialism places Britain
itself in a different perspective. It serves to remind us that Britain’s
attachment to empire should not be taken for granted, and that taking
part in the system had variable costs and benefits for different sections
of British society. It points up the fact that the overseas elements of
British world power were quite different in kind and required quite
different types of ‘British connection’. To assume that the British at
home treated their property empire, the settler societies of the white
dominions, and their ‘Indian empire’, as a single set of possessions, or
applied in each case a uniform imperial ideology, would be a basic (but
all too common) mistake. For one thing, these different components
had built up informal alliances inside British society whose outlook and
influence varied considerably. For another, the British interests at play
were themselves markedly different. For example, the large fragment
of British society with friends or relations in the great emigrant flow
to Canada after 1900 had little in common with the narrow elite that
championed the interests of the ‘Civilian Raj’, or with the shareholders
and bondholders who had tied up their fortunes with Argentine railways
or funds in Peru.
Viewed in this light, it is hard to see how the sometimes furious
debate about whether (and how far) Britain itself was ‘imperialised’ can
be settled one way or the other. On the part of some writers, huge claims
have been made about the implanting at home of racial, social and sex-
ual values derived from imperial domination abroad. The speculative
 15 / Introduction: the project of an Empire

(not to say intuitive) basis for a good deal of this writing,12 its flimsy
dependence upon a handful of texts, and the methodological error
of abstracting fragments of evidence from their broader cultural con-
text, have rightly been criticised – recently and trenchantly in Bernard
Porter’s The Absent-Minded Imperialists,13 which insisted that enthu-
siasm for imperial rule was confined to a limited section of the upper
classes. But it is equally true that, if we define empire more broadly (to
include self-governing colonies and zones of economic preponderance),
a much wider constituency saw Britain’s fate as tied up with its overseas
interests and assumed, for example, the unchallengeable right of British
migrants abroad to seize and fill up the lands of indigenous peoples.
How far these different conceptions and connections of empire helped
to ‘constitute’ British society is indeed a moot point. It can hardly be
doubted that the sense of being part of a larger political world extend-
ing far beyond Britain was very widely diffused. Only the most obtuse
of newspaper readers (perhaps three million adults by 1830)14 could
have failed to notice that external events often intruded upon their
domestic activities. Entrenched vested interests, often commanding a
loud public voice, could play upon this awareness of a ‘greater’ Britain
on whose power and prestige ‘little’ England depended. But they could
not assume a broad public sympathy for all types of empire and on
every occasion. Nor of course did the ‘imperial interest’ speak with
one voice or express a single concern. If Britain was ‘constituted’ by
its empire we should have to consider how far its ‘constitution’ was
shaped by flows of migration (and their return), a sense of pan-British
identity, the appeal of free trade (as a source of cheap overseas food),
and the claims of evangelical Christianity on the conscience and purse
of domestic society, as well as by the vicarious pleasures of lording over
‘lesser breeds without the law’. On those grounds alone, the fashionable
notion that the least attractive aspects of modern British culture can be
traced directly to its unsavoury imperial past, should only appeal to
those who like their history kept simple.
Fourthly, while the importance of India and of the ‘empire of
commerce’ are a familiar theme in almost all modern accounts of British
world power, the place of the white dominions has been all but ignored
by two generations of imperial historiography.15 At best, the overseas
British have appeared in the guise of ‘pre-fabricated collaborators’,
copying the habits and consuming the products of the industrial Britain
in whose mould they were formed.16 In a characteristically witty aside,
 16 / Introduction: the project of an Empire

the most brilliant historian of modern British imperialism dismissed

Anglo-dominion relations as a question of ‘treaties about halibut’.17
Revision is long overdue. The dominions cannot be fitted into the
Procrustean bed of ‘imperial collaboration’. Nor can their contribu-
tion to British world power be treated as less important than India’s.
In four dominions out of five (including Newfoundland), commitment
to the British cause in 1914 was a matter not of elite calculation but
of popular will. And, unlike the rest of the empire, the dominions were
willing and able to sustain a large-scale war effort in manpower and
materiel during the system’s great crisis, and to do so moreover at their
own expense. It was the will and the means to identify their interests
with those of Britain, and at huge physical cost, that made the domin-
ions so special. It was only once Britain could no longer make good
its claim on their loyalty, or had signalled a new orientation towards
Europe,18 that their attachment began to corrode.
Finally, by thinking in terms of a British system of world power,
not of a bundle of territories superintended from London, we can make
some better sense of the final strange phase of British imperialism: the
zigzags and u-turns after the Second World War. As we have seen,
with the loss of so many overseas assets, the independence of India,
the dominions’ strategic dependence upon the United States, the eclipse
of Britain itself as a great naval power, and its renewed vulnerability
to external attack, the pre-war British system had almost completely
collapsed. Yet there was also the need, and (as it seemed) the scope, to
construct a new one, to restore British security and British prosperity.
This was why the British pressed into service colonial regions that had
previously been of only marginal value in tropical Africa, tropical Asia
and the Middle East. The Middle East was a special case. The British
had been drawn deeper and deeper into this crossroads sub-continent
with its layer upon layer of cultures, religions and peoples. They had
rushed in to protect their short sea route to India through the Suez
Canal and occupied Egypt in 1882. They fought an arduous war after
1914 to protect the approaches to Egypt and the Persian Gulf against
Germany’s Ottoman ally. In the year of imperial crisis in 1918 – a
1940 that might have been – they extended their reach as far north as
the Caspian to pre-empt a German advance from the broken empire of
Russia. In the inter-war years, they clung to much of their takings. After
1945, in far gloomier conditions, they had a powerful motive to hang
on regardless. Now the Middle East was a base from which to defend
 17 / Introduction: the project of an Empire

Britain itself against the daunting threat from the east. But the costs
and risks of it all, like the costs and risks of ruling the tropical colonies
much more intensely, fell entirely on Britain. The balance of safety
became agonisingly narrow. A forward move by a rival great power
(hostile or friendly), a show of resistance by local nationalist leaders,
an open quarrel with an indispensable ally, a spasm of weakness in
an overstrained economy: each was enough to produce symptoms of
crisis. Fifteen years after the Second World War, the effort to build a
new British world-system had come to little or nothing. By 1960, it was
only a question of how to preserve as much influence as possible in a
superpower world.

But why begin the history of Britain’s world-system in the 1830s and
1840s? After all, Adam Smith, from whose sceptical phrase this book
takes its main title, saw the discovery of America and the rounding of
the Cape as decisive moments in the history of the world. By the 1770s,
when The Wealth of Nations was published, the British had won a great
North American empire, and were in the process of seizing a second
vast empire on the Indian sub-continent. If they had lost much of the
first by the mid-1780s, they had certainly gained a good deal of the
second. Between 1783 and 1815, they added much more to this haul:
Eastern Australia (annexed in 1788); the Cape Colony (taken for good
in 1806); Trinidad and Mauritius; Penang (in modern Malaysia); and
Malta and the Ionian islands in the Mediterranean. They ejected the
French from Syria and Egypt; sent their (Indian) navy into the Persian
Gulf; and made an abortive attempt to ‘liberate’ Buenos Aires from
Spanish imperial rule. By 1818, with the final defeat of the Maratha
confederacy, their East India Company was the dominant power in
South Asia. If the exertion of military power all over the globe is the
test of world power, a strong case can be made for this earlier period.19
Nor was Britain itself without obvious signs of embracing this
imperial and global role. The attempt to reassert British authority over
the American colonies had evoked very mixed feelings in opinion at
home, while the ‘oriental’ corruption of the ‘nabobs’ in India aroused
the resentment on which Burke sought to play in the impeachment
of Hastings. Adam Smith’s famous tract denounced the ‘mercantilist’
 18 / Introduction: the project of an Empire

equation between political empire and commercial expansion. But, with

the onset of world war in the 1790s, the huge mobilisation of manpower
and money for the struggle with France, the vast scope of the conflict – in
every continent – swept away any doubt that Britain’s survival required
a military effort over much of the globe. The old empire of settlement (of
which only a rump remained) paled in comparison with the new empire
of conquest. What was taken by military force would have to be kept
by arbitrary power. The untrammelled authority of British officials, not
local self-government by elected politicians, became the constitutional
rule.
Of course, this ‘empire of authority’ of which the great sym-
bol was India remained a key element in British world power almost
until its demise. But it would be wrong to see it as the dominant or
even representative element. In a longer view, the militarist ethos of
1790–1815 was a transient phase: it soon came under domestic attack
once peace and depression set in. The following decades saw the steady
restriction of governors’ powers except in the poorest or most vulner-
able outposts. The 1790s to the 1820s was an age of crisis and strain.
It was less the classical era of British world power than its turbulent
pre-history, when prevailing conditions remained very uncertain. In the
1830s and 1840s, by contrast, most of the favourable conditions had
begun to converge for the growth of the loose decentralised construct
that sustained British world power into the 1940s.
The first and most fundamental was the new balance of power
and wealth across Eurasia. China’s defeat in the first opium war (1839–
42), however partial, signalled that East Asia would be a passive actor in
world politics for the foreseeable future. The implications were massive.
Peking had lost by default the chance to invoke great power diplomacy
to restrain its unwelcome new sea-borne neighbour. British interests
could press forward in maritime East Asia against only local resistance.
The value of India as the base from which to project British power
in the East had been strikingly vindicated. At almost the same time,
the prolonged ‘Eastern crisis’ of 1830–41 confirmed the fragility of the
Ottoman and Iranian empires, and the wide new scope for British trade
and diplomacy in Egypt and the Middle East. The Eastern crisis was also
a critical test of the post-Napoleonic order in Europe. What it revealed
was not the existence of British hegemony (that luxuriant myth of
current historiography) but a pattern of European politics which, while
not free from conflict, disfavoured both a grand coalition against Britain
 19 / Introduction: the project of an Empire

(a constant threat between 1778 and 1814) and recourse to a general

war. Although their European diplomacy was intermittently stressful,
the British were able to distribute their military power across the globe
(and lock up much of their army in India after 1860) on the cheerful
assumption that domestic invasion was at worst a remote possibility. In
the Americas, too, the geopolitical climate after 1830 was much more
propitious. The new Latin American states were now fully detached
from their old masters in Europe, and thrown open (in theory at least)
to British influence and trade. With the anglo-settler republic in North
America, relations were more fractious. But the headlong expansion
of the ‘slave south’ (the main source of Lancashire cotton) and the
commercial Northeast (with its close ties to London and Liverpool)
had created a sufficient degree of mutual dependence to avert renewal
of the frontier and maritime warfare of 1812–14, despite the prolonged
crisis in Canada and the territorial disputes in Maine and Oregon. An
American war, as the British well knew, would have been a strategic
catastrophe with global effects.
The other conditions can be listed more briefly. The scale of
Britain’s industrialisation after 1830 was critical (a simple index of this
is the production of pig iron: 1796: 125,000 tons; 1830: 677,000 tons;
1860: 3.8 million tons20 ). Pre-industrial empires required an abundance
of coercive force to suppress rebellion and repel external attack. Even
close commercial and cultural ties were no guarantee of colonial loy-
alty, as the Thirteen Colonies had shown. Industrialism changed the
context and equation of imperial power. It increased the dependence
of ‘colonial’ economies, and encouraged their development in every
world region. It facilitated the global projection of military power far
beyond the old limits of wind-powered warships, and greatly cheapened
its use once telegraph, steamship and railway could shuttle informa-
tion and manpower swiftly across vast distances. It turned the demo-
graphic imperialism of settler societies from a slow laborious advance
into a Blitzkrieg invasion, swamping local resistance and transforming
faraway natural environments into ‘neo-Europes’ and ‘new Britains’.
It hugely reinforced the cultural prestige of the imperial rulers, and
(through the new technologies of communication) increased the volume
and intensity of their cultural impact. Industrialisation was also closely
connected with two other pre-conditions for the growth of Britain’s
world-system: the great British out-migration and the export of capital.
Not until the 1830s and 1840s did the annual trickle of migrants begin
 20 / Introduction: the project of an Empire

to swell into the flood that helped build a ‘British world’. Not till the
1850s and 1860s were the funds coming to hand to build the City’s
great property empire abroad. In short, without the geopolitical and
‘geo-economic’ conditions which Britain was peculiarly well placed to
exploit, but which had scarcely developed before 1830, British expan-
sion would indeed have remained ‘not an empire, but the project of
an empire; not a gold mine, but the project of a gold mine’. With-
out them, the only safe course for Britain would have been, in Adam
Smith’s words, ‘to accommodate her future views and designs to the
real mediocrity of her circumstances’.21

In the story that follows, Part I attempts to describe how a British

system emerged in the long ‘Victorian peace’ (a relative term to Zulus,
Ashanti, Sudanese, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Aborigines, Maori, Indians,
Burmese, Chinese and others) up to 1914. Part II traces its fate in the
‘age of iron’ that followed.