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

EGYPT AND THE SUDAN TO 1922

Disraeli’s purchase, with Rothschild money, of 176,602 shares of Suez Canal stock for £ 3,680,000 from the Khedive of Egypt in 1875 was motivated by concern for the British communications with India, just as the British acquisition of the Cape of Good Hope in 1814 had resulted from the same concern. But in imperial matters one step leads to another, and every acquisition obtained to protect an earlier acquisition requires a new advance at a later date to protect it. This was clearly true in Africa where such motivations gradually extended British control southward from Egypt and northward from the Cape until these were joined in central Africa with the conquest of German Tanganyika in 1916.

The extravagances of the Khedive Ismail (1863-1879), which had compelled the sale of his Suez Canal shares, led ultimately to the creation of an Anglo-French condominium to manage the Egyptian foreign debt and to the deposition of the khedive by his suzerain, the Sultan of Turkey. The condominium led to disputes and finally to open fighting between Egyptian nationalists and Anglo-French forces. When the French refused to join the British in a joint bombardment of Alexandria in 1882, the condominium was broken, and Britain reorganized the country in such a fashion that, while all public positions were held by Egyptians, a British army was in occupation, British “advisers” controlled all the chief governmental posts, and a British “resident,” Sir Evelyn Baring (known as Lord Cromer after 1892), controlled all finances and really ruled the country until 1907.

Inspired by fanatical Muslim religious agitators (dervishes), the Mahdi Muhammad Ahmed led a Sudanese revolt against Egyptian control in 1883, massacred a British force under General Charles (“Chinese”) Gordon at Khartoum, and maintained an independent Sudan for fifteen years. In 1898 a British force under (Lord) Kitchener, seeking to protect the Nile water supply of Egypt, fought its way southward against fanatical Sudanese tribesmen and won a decisive victory at Omdurman. An Anglo-Egyptian convention established a condominium known as the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in the area between Egypt and the Congo River. This area, which had lived in disorder for centuries, was gradually pacified, brought under the rule of law, irrigated by extensive hydraulic works, and brought under cultivation, producing, chiefly, long staple cotton.

EAST CENTRAL AFRICA TO 1910

South and east of the Sudan the struggle for a British Africa was largely in the hands of H. H. (Sir Harry) Johnston (1858-1927) and Frederick (later Lord) Lugard (1858-1945). These two, chiefly using private funds but frequently holding official positions, fought all over tropical Africa, ostensibly seeking to pacify it and to wipe out the Arab slave trade, but always possessing a burning desire to extend British rule. Frequently, these ambitions led to rivalries with supporters of French and German ambitions in the same regions. In 1884 Johnston obtained many concessions from native chiefs in the Kenya area, turning these over to the British East Africa Company in 1887. When this company went bankrupt in 1895, most of its rights were taken over by the British government. In the meantime, Johnston had moved south, into a chaos of Arab slavers’ intrigues and native unrest in Nyasaland (1888). Here his exploits were largely financed by Rhodes (1889-1893) in order to prevent the Portuguese Mozambique Company from pushing westward toward the Portuguese West African colony of Angola to block the Cape-to-Cairo route. Lord Salisbury made Nyasaland a British Protectorate after a deal with Rhodes in which the South African promised to pay £ 10,000 a year toward the cost of the new territory. About the same time Rhodes gave the Liberal Party a substantial financial contribution in return for a promise that they would not abandon Egypt. He had already (1888) given £ 10,000 to the Irish Home Rule Party on condition that it seek Home Rule for Ireland while keeping Irish members in the British Parliament as a step toward Imperial Federation.

Rhodes’s plans received a terrible blow in 1890-1891 when Lord Salisbury sought to end the African disputes with Germany and Portugal by delimiting their territorial claims in South and East Africa. The Portuguese agreement of 1891 was never ratified, but the Anglo-German agreement of 1890 blocked Rhodes’s route to Egypt by extending German East Africa (Tanganyika) west to the Belgium Congo. By the same agreement Germany abandoned Nyasaland, Uganda, and Zanzibar to Britain in return for the island of Heligoland in the Baltic Sea and an advantageous boundary in German Southwest Africa.

As soon as the German agreement was published, Lugard was sent by the British East Africa Company to overcome the resistance of native chiefs and slavers in Uganda (1890-1894). The bankruptcy of this company in 1895 seemed likely to lead to the abandonment of Uganda because of the Little Englander sentiment in the Liberal Party (which was in office in 1892-1895). Rhodes offered to take the area over himself and run it for £ 25,000 a year, but was refused. As a result of complex and secret negotiations in which Lord Rosebery was the chief figure, Britain kept Uganda, Rhodes was made a privy councilor, Rosebery replaced his father-in-law, Lord Rothschild, in Rhodes’s secret group and was made a Trustee under Rhodes’s next (and last) will. Rosebery tried to obtain a route for Rhodes’s railway to the north across the Belgian Congo; Rosebery was informed of Rhodes’s plans to finance an uprising of the English within the Transvaal (Boer) Republic and to send Dr. Jameson on a raid into that country “to restore order”; and, finally, Rhodes found the money to finance Kitchener’s railway from Egypt to Uganda, using the South African gauge and engines given by Rhodes.

The economic strength which allowed Rhodes to do these things rested in his diamond and gold mines, the latter in the Transvaal, and thus not in British territory. North of Cape Colony, across the Orange River, was a Boer republic, the Orange Free State. Beyond this, and separated by the Vaal River, was another Boer republic, the Transvaal. Beyond this, across the Limpopo River and continuing northward to the Zambezi River, was the savage native kingdom of the Matabeles. With great personal daring, unscrupulous opportunism, and extravagant expenditure of money, Rhodes obtained an opening to the north, passing west of the Boer republics, by getting British control in Griqualand West (1880), Bechuanaland, and the Bechuanaland Protectorate (1885). In 1888 Rhodes obtained a vague but extensive mining concession from the Matabeles’ chief, Lobengula, and gave it to the British South Africa Company organized for the purpose (1889). Rhodes obtained a charter so worded that the company had very extensive powers in an area without any northern limits beyond Bechuanaland Protectorate. Four years later the A4atabeles were attacked and destroyed by Dr. Jameson, and their lands taken by the company. The company, however, was not a commercial success, and paid no dividends for thirty-five years (1889-1924) and only 12.5 shillings in forty-six years. This compares with 793.5 percent dividends paid by Rhodes’s Consolidated Gold Fields in the five years 1889-1894 and the 125 percent dividend it paid in 1896. Most of the South Africa Company’s money was used on public improvements like roads and schools, and no rich mines were found in its territory (known as Rhodesia) compared to those farther south in the Transvaal.

In spite of the terms of the Rhodes wills, Rhodes himself was not a racist. Nor was he a, political democrat. He worked as easily and as closely with Jews, black natives, or Boers as he did with English. But he had a passionate belief in the value of a liberal education, and was attached to a restricted suffrage and even to a non-secret ballot. In South Africa he was a staunch friend of the Dutch and of the blacks, found his chief political support among the Boers, until at least 1895, and wanted restrictions on natives put on an educational rather than on a color basis. These ideas have generally been held by his group since and have played an important role in British imperial history. His greatest weakness rested on the fact that his passionate attachment to his goals made him overly tolerant in regard to methods. He did not hesitate to use either bribery or force to attain his ends if he judged they would be effective. This weakness led to his greatest errors, the Jameson Raid of 1895 and the Boer War of 1899-1902, errors which were disastrous for the future of the empire he loved.