David Reynolds - Island Stories

Britain would never have risen so high but for the ‘multiplier’ effect of empire. It was the empire which made Britain great. At the start of the twentieth century Britain and Ireland had only 42 million people, whereas the population of the USA was 76 million and of Tsarist Russia 133 million. When the inhabitants of Britain’s overseas territories were included, however, the arithmetic looked different. At its peak after the Great War, the British Empire covered nearly a quarter of the earth’s land surface and encompassed a similar proportion of its population, over 500 million in all. France accounted for only 9 per cent of the earth’s land surface and 108 million of its people.[55] At times of crisis the empire could serve as a vast resource of material and manpower. During the Great War the British government mobilised 6.7 million men from Britain and Ireland, but 3 million more came from the empire – nearly half of these from India.[56] In 1939–45 the imperial contribution was yet more pronounced: while the UK mobilised 5.9 million, the so-called ‘white dominions’ – Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa – raised nearly 2.5 million and India over 2 million.[57]

Mindful of such statistics, some historians have castigated British leaders for ‘losing’ the empire, because that diminished the country’s ability to compete with the continent-sized superpowers. Correlli Barnett, for instance, argued that if the British had not lost their nerve, they could have held on to India by ‘resolute autocracy’.[58] Yet it was not willpower but hard power that mattered. And, to quote again the German commentator Constantin Frantz in 1882, Britain was really ‘an artificial worldpower’ ( eine künstliche Weltmacht ) because ‘the territorial base of this power was just a European country’ and its resources came from colonies spread out across the oceans which were tied to Britain only ‘through the threads of the fleet’ and ‘these threads could all be broken or cut’.[59] This was not a vast continental empire commanding adjacent terrain, unlike the United States and the Soviet Union after each had surmounted its crisis of civil war – in 1861–5 and 1917–22 respectively.

This lack of a contiguous continental empire was Britain’s basic weakness as a world power. But almost as significant was the diversity of its colonial territories. The empire emerged haphazardly, with little coordination from London. There were leftovers in Canada and the Caribbean from the pre-1776 American colonies; spoils from the wars against France, of which India was the most important; the fruits of creeping imperialism in West Africa as weak tribal governments caved in before the advance of European commerce, conquest and culture; pre-emptive strikes in South and East Africa in the late nineteenth century to block European rivals; and the carve-up of the decaying Ottoman Empire before and after the Great War, including territories such as Egypt astride the Suez Canal, oil-rich Iraq and the poisoned chalice of Palestine.

Nor did Britain truly ‘own’ these diverse ‘possessions’. British control was usually superficial. In colonies settled by white emigrants from the UK, who dominated the indigenous population, successive London governments gradually followed the path of increasing devolution. This pattern began in Canada in the 1840s and was extended to the other white-settler colonies in Australasia and southern Africa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By 1931, when the London Parliament’s residual authority was abrogated, the Dominions – as the white-settler colonies were known – were effectively independent in all domestic affairs. Although still dependent on Britain for defence, the main bond linking them with Britain was that of loyalty to the country from which many of them, or their parents, had only recently emigrated in the early decades of the twentieth century. This ‘Britannic nationalism’ was a potent force in mobilising support for the ‘mother country’ in the two world wars. In the 1930s, for instance, over 95 per cent of Australians and nearly 50 per cent of Canadians were of British stock.[60]

This policy of measured devolution was adopted in colonies where there was a large British settler community and also the capacity for fiscal independence. ‘Non-white’ colonies were treated differently because, until well after 1945, they were generally thought incapable of self-government. In these cases the British employed more autocratic and paternalistic methods, with an unelected government headed by a British Governor exercising certain devolved powers under supervision from London. Much of the dependent empire was run in this way as Crown Colonies. Even where there seemed little benefit to Britain – as in West Africa, the West Indies or the Falklands – London clung on for fear that a rival power might acquire the territories or because these lacked a natural ethnic or political viability. At the same time the British tried to minimise the costs of continued rule, thereby turning a blind eye to the problems of poverty and underdevelopment unless, as in the 1930s Caribbean, these colonies exploded in serious disorder. This was empire on the cheap: Britain was getting little out but putting little in.

Between the Dominions and the Crown Colonies stands the special case of India. There Britain supplanted the Mughal emperors as the paramount power. In what was called British India they ruled directly through the Indian Civil Service, headed by a European elite of only 1,300. In some six hundred princely states, covering a third of the sub-continent, they ruled indirectly through hereditary lords who handled all but defence and foreign policy under the eye of a British ‘Resident’. British influence over a population numbering over 300 million in 1900 essentially depended on alliances with local landed and commercial leaders and on the Western-educated Indians who filled the clerical grades of British administration. Despite early Victorian waves of evangelical and reforming zeal, Indians – as elsewhere in the empire – were largely left to their own religious, social and cultural practices, except when order was threatened or British interests jeopardised.

In India, those interests were substantial. Around 1900 Britain provided 60 per cent of India’s imports – particularly textiles, machinery and iron and steel products – and used the surplus generated to balance its deficits on trade with continental Europe and North America. Even more important was the Indian army. In 1914, its strength of 160,000 fighting troops – one-third of them British – represented half of Britain’s peacetime military strength: vital manpower for a country with no tradition of military conscription. And this was also a cut-price army: India, in Lord Salisbury’s phrase, was ‘an English barrack in the Oriental seas from which we may draw any number of troops without paying for them’.[61] More precisely, the Government of India paid out of its own tax revenues for the peacetime army in India and for the basic costs of troops serving overseas. During the Great War, 1.3 million Indian troops were sent abroad – from France to Gallipoli to East Africa – and they played a particularly significant role in the defeat of the Ottoman Turks, bringing Palestine and Iraq under British control.

Looking back now, the great British Empire seems like a bit of a con. How could so many be ruled for so long by so few? Admittedly, there were positive forces promoting acceptance of British imperial rule: the ties of ‘Britishness’ in the settler colonies, for instance, and the networks of clientage in India and elsewhere. But ultimately empire rests on force, or the threat of force, and for much of the Victorian era this could be exerted through superior British military technology. The Royal Navy may have faced growing European challengers, but it needed only a few steam-driven gunboats to overwhelm the Chinese junks and open up that country to European trade in the mid-nineteenth century. The British army may have been comical as far as Bismarck’s Europe was concerned, but it was quite sufficient to handle most threats on the imperial periphery. At the battle of Omdurman in 1898, General Horatio Kitchener’s army – including the young Winston Churchill – won control of the Sudan at the cost of only 368 men. His adversary, the Khalifa, lost 11,000: massacred by 3,500 shells and half a million bullets. In the pithy couplet of Hilaire Belloc: