Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The British Imperial Crisis: Africa, Ireland, and India to 1926

INTRODUCTION

The old statement that England acquired its empire in a fit of absent-mindedness is amusing but does not explain very much. It does, however, contain an element of truth: much of the empire was acquired by private individuals and commercial firms, and was taken over by the British government much later. The motives which impelled the government to annex areas which its citizens had been exploiting were varied, both in time and in place, and were frequently much different from what an outsider might believe.

Britain acquired the world’s greatest empire because it possessed certain advantages which other countries lacked. We mention three of these advantages: (1) that it was an island, (2) that it was in the Atlantic, and (3) that its social traditions at home produced the will and the talents for imperial acquisition.

As an island off the coast of Europe, Britain had security as long as it had control of the narrow seas. It had such control from the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 until the creation of new weapons based on air power in the period after 1935. The rise of the German Air Force under Hitler, the invention of the long-range rocket projectiles (V-2 weapon) in 1944, and the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs in 1945-1955 destroyed England’s security by reducing the defensive effectiveness of the English Channel. But in the period 1588-1942, in which Britain controlled the seas, the Channel gave England security and made its international position entirely different from that of any continental Power. Because Britain had security, it had freedom of action. That means it had a choice whether to intervene or to stay out of the various disputes which arose on the Continent of Europe or elsewhere in the world. Moreover, if it intervened, it could do so on a limited commitment, restricting its contribution of men, energy, money, and wealth to whatever amount it wished. If such a limited commitment were exhausted or lost, so long as the British fleet controlled the seas, Britain had security, and thus had freedom to choose if it would break off its intervention or increase its commitment. Moreover, England could make even a small commitment of its resources of decisive importance by using this commitment in support of the second strongest Power on the Continent against the strongest Power, thus hampering the strongest Power and making the second Power temporarily the strongest, as long as it acted in accord with Britain’s wishes. In this way, by following balance-of-power tactics, Britain was able to play a decisive role on the Continent, keep the Continent divided and embroiled in its own disputes, and do this with a limited commitment of Britain’s own resources, leaving a considerable surplus of energy, manpower, and wealth available for acquiring an empire overseas. In addition, Britain’s unique advantage in having security through a limited commitment of resources by control of the sea was one of the contributing factors which allowed Britain to develop its unique social structure, its parliamentary system, its wide range of civil liberties, and its great economic advance.

The Powers on the Continent had none of these advantages. Since each could be invaded by its neighbors at any time, each had security, and thus freedom of action, only on rare and brief occasions. When the security of a continental Power was threatened by a neighbor, it had no freedom of action, but had to defend itself with all its resources. Clearly, it would be impossible for France to say to itself, “We shall oppose German hegemony on the Continent only to the extent of 50,000 men or of $10 million.” Yet as late as 1939, Chamberlain informed France that England’s commitment on the Continent for this purpose would be no more than two divisions.

Since the continental Powers had neither security nor freedom of action, their position on the Continent always was paramount over their ambitions for world empire, and these latter always had to be sacrificed for the sake of the former whenever a conflict arose. France was unable to hold on to its possessions in India or in North America in the eighteenth century because so much of its resources had to be used to bolster French security against Prussia or Austria. Napoleon sold Louisiana to the United States in 1803 because his primary concern had to be his position on the Continent. Bismarck tried to discourage Germany from embarking on any overseas adventures in the period after 1871 because he saw that Germany must be a continental power or be nothing. Again, France in 1882 had to yield Egypt to Britain, and in 1898 had to yield the Sudan in the same way, because it saw that it could not engage in any colonial dispute with Britain while the German Army stood across the Rhineland. This situation was so clear that all the lesser continental Powers with overseas colonial possessions, such as Portugal, Belgium, or the Netherlands, had to collaborate with Britain, or, at the very least, be carefully neutral. So long as the ocean highway from these countries to their overseas empires was controlled by the British fleet, they could not afford to embark on a policy hostile to Britain, regardless of their personal feelings on the subject. It is no accident that Britain’s most constant international backing in the two centuries following the Methuen Treaty of 1703 came from Portugal and that Britain has felt free to negotiate with a third Power, like Germany, regarding the disposition of the Portuguese colonies, as she did in 1898 and tried to do in 1937-1939.

Britain’s position on the Atlantic, combined with her naval control of the sea, gave her a great advantage when the new lands to the west of that ocean became one of the chief sources of commercial and naval wealth in the period after 1588. Lumber, tar, and ships were supplied from the American colonies to Britain in the period before the advent of iron, steam-driven ships (after i860), and these ships helped to establish Britain’s mercantile supremacy. At the same time, Britain’s insular position deprived her monarchy of any need for a large professional, mercenary army such as the kings on the Continent used as the chief bulwark of royal absolutism. As a result, the kings of England were unable to prevent the landed gentry from taking over the control of the government in the period 1642-1690, and the kings of England became constitutional monarchy Britain’s security behind her navy allowed this struggle to go to a decision without any important outside interference, and permitted a rivalry between monarch and aristocracy which would have been suicidal on the insecure grounds of continental Europe.

Britain’s security combined with the political triumph of the landed oligarchy to create a social tradition entirely unlike that on the Continent. One result of these two factors was that England did not obtain a bureaucracy such as appeared on the Continent. This lack of a separate bureaucracy loyal to the monarch can be seen in the weakness of the professional army (already mentioned) and also in the lack of a bureaucratic judicial system. In England, the gentry and the younger sons of the landed oligarchy studied law in the Inns of Court and obtained a feeling for tradition and the sanctity of due process of law while still remaining a part of the landed class. In fact this class became the landed class in England just because they obtained control of the bar and the bench and were, thus, in a position to judge all disputes about real property in their own favor. Control of the courts and of the Parliament made it possible for this ruling group in England to override the rights of the peasants in land, to eject them from the land, to enclose the open fields of the medieval system, to deprive the cultivators of their manorial rights and thus to reduce them to the condition of landless rural laborers or of tenants. This advance of the enclosure movement in England made possible the Agricultural Revolution, greatly depopulated the rural areas of England (as described in The Deserted Village of Oliver Goldsmith), and provided a surplus population for the cities, the mercantile and naval marine, and for overseas colonization.