WS 2004 Introduction to British Civilization Ptzold Some Notes on hte British Empire

I.

Imperialism to Postcolonialism: Perspectives on the British Empire

In theory, Imperialism, the principle, spirit, or system of empire, is driven by ideology, whereas Colonialism, the principle, spirit, or system of establishing colonies, is driven by commerce. In practice, it is often difficult to distinguish where one ends and the other begins. Historians make a distinction between two British Empires, dating the first from the seventeenth century, when the European demand for sugar and tobacco led to the development of plantations on the islands of the Caribbean and in southeast North America. These colonies, and those settled by religious dissenters in northeast North America, attracted increasing numbers of British and European colonists. The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries saw the first British Empire expanding into areas formerly controlled by the Dutch and Spanish Empires (then in decline) and coming into conflict with French colonial aspirations in Africa, Canada, and India. With the Treaty of Paris in 1763, the British effectively took control of Canada and India, but the American Revolution brought their first empire to an end. Captain James Cook's voyages to Australia and New Zealand in the 1770s initiated a further phase of territorial expansion that led to the second British Empire. This reached its widest point during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901). At no time in the first half of her reign was empire a central preoccupation of her or her governments, but this was to change in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), which altered the balance of power in Europe. During the next decades, two great statesmen brought the issue of imperialism to the top of the nation's political agenda: the flamboyant Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), who had a romantic vision of empire that the sterner William Ewart Gladstone (1809- 1898) distrusted and rejected. Disraeli's expansionist vision prevailed and was transmitted by newspapers and novels to a reading public dramatically expanded by the Education Act of 1870. Symbolically, the British Empire reached its highest point on June 22, 1897, the occasion of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, which the British celebrated as a festival of empire. It was "a Roman moment." The analogy of the Roman Empire was endlessly invoked in discussions of the British Empire. It figures, for example, at the start of Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness and in Embarkation, the first of Thomas Hardy's "War Poems." The Roman Empire, at its height, comprised perhaps 120 million people in an area of 2.5 million square miles. The British Empire, in 1897, comprised some 372 million people in 11 million square miles. An interesting aspect of the analogy is that the Roman Empire was long held -- by the descendants of the defeated and oppressed peoples of the British Isles -- to be generally a good thing. Children in the United Kingdom are still taught that the Roman legions brought laws and roads, civilization

rather than oppression, and in the second half of the nineteenth century, that was the precedent invoked to sanction the Pax Britannica. In 1897 the Empire seemed invincible, but only two years later British confidence was shaken by the news of defeats at Magersfontein and Spion Kop in the AngloBoer War. Those and other battles were lost, but eventually the war was won, and it took two world wars to bring the British Empire to its end. Those wars also were won, with the loyal help of troops from the overseas empire (more than 200,000 of whom were killed in World War I alone). In return, however, the countries of the overseas empire wanted a greater measure of self-government, and, in 1931, the British Parliament recognized the independent and equal status under the Crown of its former dominions within a British Commonwealth of Nations. Following World War II, most of the remaining imperial possessions were granted independence; and fifty years after Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, India, "the Jewel in the Crown" (Disraeli's phrase), was cut in two to become the Commonwealth countries of India and Pakistan. The most recent development in the dismantling of the British Empire was the restoration to Chinese rule, under a declaration signed in 1984, of the former British crown colony of Hong Kong, on the southeastern coast of China. The Union Jack was finally and symbolically lowered on 1 July 1997 in a ceremony attended by the last British Governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten.

II. Reasons for wanting colonies, and for giving them up again, and why it was the Europeans who went in for colonies in a big way.
The British empire deserves its fame. It was huge, as Russia's Asian territories were and are; at its peak, some 34m sq km, over one-fifth of the land area of the globe. Unlike Asian Russia, it was also populous; until 1947 it included the huge numbers of the Indian subcontinent. Yet its colonies on the American seaboard were British for less than 170 years. Australia, Canada and New Zealand remained British for about 100 years apiece before being handed over to their (settler) inhabitants. South Africa's Afrikaners were barely defeated in 1902 before they-not its blacks, of course-got their land back in 1910. The British were not much more adhesive even in the lands whose only claimants were brown or black: less than 200 years in India, 80 or fewer in most of Africa. The Caribbean was the one significant exception. So why set out? And why not stay? On the face of it, all this is very odd. Europe's ideas and money and weapons gave it greater power than any other group of peoples in history. And after 200 or 300 years, it walked out. Even the Russians have done so. Their 19th-century seizures of central Asia were done with a speed and violence that make the United States' westward expansion and Indian wars look like a leisurely church picnic. And, unlike others, under communism the Russians showed no sign of remorse, let alone of getting out. Yet out of central Asia in the 1990s they went, retaining vast areas of Siberia, it's true, but most of them barely inhabited and, today at least, barely habitable and economically useless. So why did the imperialists ever set forth? One common, only mildly left-wing, answer is that the booming capitalist economies of the 19th century needed an assured supply of raw materials, assured new markets and new places to invest in. And why,

having gone and grabbed these, did the imperialists come home so relatively soon? The standard answer is that, for all its relative strength, Europe, exhausted by the second world war, saw it could not afford to hold on, in the face of assertive liberation movements. Besides (here the left chimes in), it realised that it could get what it wanted more conveniently under neo-colonial forms. There is plainly some truth in this; and, rather less plainly, some falsehood. The early empire-builders, from Spain and Portugal, were in the Americas partly in pursuit of souls; it takes heroic refusal to accept men's account of their own motives to deny that. They were also, more earnestly, in pursuit of precious metals. They cared little for trade. Spain kept foreign ships out, but hardly encouraged Spanish ones: the crown, to increase its own revenue, at one time limited them to just one port in Spain, Seville, and two in the Americas. Likewise, its efforts to tax the trade simply boosted intra-colonial commerce, lessening exports from Spain. Later on, the Dutch indeed acquired their empire to protect their trade. And they were after commodities. But not as raw materials: these were spices, for resale. Britain too acquired parts of its empire through, or to aid, its traders; the old joke that it did so "in a fit of absent-mindedness" is tosh. Yet not wholly tosh. Its American colonies were indeed a valued market; but that is not why Britain came by them. It took Canada, from France, mainly to protect these, not for its own poor value. India, initially, was a source of manufactures, not a market for them; only later did it become that. Australia and New Zealand, when first claimed, had no commercial value at all. Of course, one can reply that all this predated 19th-century capitalism. Yes, but an explanation of empire that explains only its last 80 years is not very useful. In fact, it does not explain much of that period either. Securing raw materials by the 1880s really was not an issue; they were indeed needed, in ever-greater volume, but they could be, and were, bought from willing suppliers as they are now. As for markets, it is true that Europe's industrialists were starting to fear overproduction, and its governments-rather later-to install protective tariffs. Yet, even in what they saw as the depression years of 1875-95, economies were growing fast. And whatever the dreams, the reality was that, with the big exception of British sales to India (an empire already a century old), imperial markets did not amount to much; least of all, the new colonies of "the age of empire", trivial compared to markets at home. What did Germany sell to its 14m new colonial subjects? France to its vast new areas of Africa, or even to richer Indochina? The British to Burma, taken over in 1886? The Belgians to their brutalised Congolese? Precious little, even as a share of exports, let alone of total sales. In this heyday of empire, four-fifths of the trade (and investment abroad) of European countries was with each other or developed countries abroad. The main economic motive was surely far simpler: that of the British and Dutch for centuries earlier, the simple greed of men who reckoned they could make money "out there", and who preferred, once it proved true, to be protected and governed by their own kind. Hence the quasi-colonial concessions wrung by sundry countries from

China; not just the right for their traders to trade, but to do so under, more or less, their own administration. Hence Britain's seizure of South Africa: once adventurers like Cecil Rhodes discovered its riches, who was to run the place? Unsurprisingly, Britons preferred Britons to Boers. At least as big a drive behind the new imperialism were the rivalries of the powers. Britain, beside the peacock pride of empire, had solid strategic reasons: owning India, it needed first its old Cape Colony, later the new Suez canal, then Egypt, then the coaling station of Aden. Others fed mainly their egos. A colony, as the German emperor made plain, was a feather in one's cap-and not in the other fellow's. Italy, having got three, as late as the 1930s went for Ethiopia again; succeeded this time, and found it as useless as the others. Why the Europeans? Whatever their motives, why was it Europeans who sailed worldwide and built empires? Why not (until Japan moved into Taiwan in 1895, then Korea, then Manchuria) other powers? One reason is that some others, such as the Mongols, did not need to; they used horses. Others chose not to. China "had the men, it had the ships, it had the money too"; yet a 15th-century emperor banned the building of seagoing vessels. Two centuries later, Japan did likewise. Both countries looked inward. The Turks might have gone worldwide. Their galleys were good enough to strike fear for centuries in the Mediterranean. But their empire needed no more, and they never built ships fit for the oceans. It was Algerian corsairs, not the Turkish empire, who on one occasion raided as far north as Iceland. But there was more to it than that. Europe had the men, the ships, the money, and on top it had the guns. It knew how to put all four together. No one else did, bar the Americans, who challenged Britain's navy in the 1770s, and blew Spain's apart in 1898; as, more significantly, Japan's navy did to Russia's at the battle of Tsushima in 1905. But Europe had something more valuable, in this context, than technology. It had commercial enterprise and rivalries. Its umpteen states were often at war, their merchants always competing: two forces that drive technology and much else. The Spanish and Portuguese claimed a monopoly of the oceans and the Americas. Dutch, British and French sea-captains and merchants soon set out to disprove it. And yet, quite rapidly, they all went home. Why? Spain and Portugal quit because, in and after the Napoleonic wars, they were too weak to subdue their Latin American subjects. Equally, the great decolonisation of 1945-75 would have been delayed had not Japan cracked Europe's Asian empires; and war, and later American pressure, left their owners too exhausted to glue them together again. As all imperialists have found, Mongols and Turks included, keeping the thing in one piece is a costly business. Yet there was more to the great retreat than that. The British had to be kicked out by the future United States, indeed. Yet they chose to leave Canada, Australia and, eventually, South Africa. Even while tirelessly pretending the time was not ripe to quit India, they preached (elsewhere) the values that proved them wrong, and they

tolerated those Indians who said so. The "wind of change"-a Conservative prime minister's phrase-that swept them from Africa was not just one of economic or geopolitical realism; it was also one of ideas, ideas that they themselves held. The French were tougher: they fought two vicious wars trying to retain Vietnam and Algeria. Yet the ideas were French too. The end of the European empires was indeed a triumph for the liberation movements; but one over Europe's stubbornness, not its best beliefs. Notes: For lists of further reading on European imperialism, see Fordham University's Modern History Sourcebook on Imperialism. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, published quarterly, follows current academic discussions on the topic. From: The Millennium edition of The Economist