British Foreign Policy since 1870

By Will Podmore

This book survey Britain´s foreign policy since 1870. Conventional accounts stress the rulers´ benevolent rhetoric: I present the evidence that refutes this superficial, liberal view.
Britain´s economy is the key to understanding its foreign policy: capitalism causes a conflict-ridden foreign policy. The rulers´ focus has been on seizing profits from abroad, for which they have sacrificed the welfare of the British people.
British governments - Conservative, Liberal and Labour alike - have represented the tiny minority who own the means of production, and have opposed the great majority who have to work for a living.
The ruling class´s external focus has also damaged relations with other countries and helped to produce the two recurring types of war - wars between rival empires and wars against national liberation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 13, 2008
• ISBN: 9781462835775

Will Podmore

Will Podmore is married, with four children and one grandson. A member of the University and College Union, he lives in London. Chief Librarian at the British School of Osteopathy, he previously worked at the Royal Courts of Justice, HMSO Publications and the British Library. He has degrees from University College London, and Keele, London and Sussex Universities. Previous publications include Sovereignty for what? Why stopping EMU is just the start, 1997; Britain, Italy, Germany and the Spanish Civil War, 1998; Reg Birch: Engineer, Trade Unionist, Communist, 2004; and The European Union – Bad for Britain – A Trade Union View, 2005.

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Copyright © 2008 by Will Podmore.

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Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Endnotes

Bibliography

Introduction

What is going on in the world troubles many people, who feel the need to try to do something to help. This concern has taken many forms, from Oxfam to CND. It has also produced much written work on Britain’s record in international affairs.

Some say that nobody is interested in foreign policy. But issues like the single currency, the war in Yugoslavia, the introduction of US cruise missiles, Rhodesia, Suez, India, Munich, and the war in Spain, have all generated intense controversies. Foreign policy encompasses the questions of war and peace, of life and death. When I was at school and university in the 1960s, discussions raged about the USA’s war in Vietnam. Each of us has experienced at least some of these debates, and we know that those involved try to win our support by many different means.

We know that we cannot just take at face value what governments say or write, just as we do not rely on a person’s self-estimate as the last word on the subject. We have to try to distinguish between the rhetoric and the reality, difficult though this can be in controversial matters. We can and do make up our own minds on these matters; we are not empty vessels, capable of being filled by whatever propaganda others might offer us. We form our own understanding of the world; nobody else can do that for us. It is a myth that the media or academia forms our understanding.

In this book, I have tried to survey Britain’s foreign policy since 1870. I have tried to tell the story and to explain why events happened the way they did. I have aimed to give due weight to what Paul Kennedy called ‘the realities behind diplomacy’—finance, trade, politics, and military strategy. How important were these matters compared with the talk of peace and democracy? What are the real motive forces of policy-making? Who makes foreign policy?

Other questions could be: why has Britain been involved in more wars than virtually any other nation? Why, after winning so many wars in the 19th century, and being on the winning side in the two World Wars in the 20th century, has Britain’s power declined? What connection is there, if any, with Britain’s economic decline? Is continued decline unavoidable? Is our present situation new, or is it a re-run of earlier episodes? Why have different governments not solved the problems? How has Britain coped with the end of Empire and with the Commonwealth? Why does Britain still have MI6 officers stationed in other countries? What has been the effect of the floods of foreign investment going in and out of Britain? Has Britain anything to do with war, poverty and tyranny abroad?

Especially now, when there is intense debate about the European Constitution, we need to ask, what is our relationship to the European Union, to Europe, and to the nations outside Europe?

Many questions! This book proposes some answers. Britain’s constitution gives the executive exclusive control over foreign affairs and the war power. Those who made policy were a very small number of people in the higher reaches of the state. They saw the Empire as if it were an inherited landed estate, which they tried to preserve as intact as possible to hand on to the next generation. But other nations experienced Empire as an act of breaking and entering into their nation. They saw the Empire’s rulers and agents as thieves, who became illegal squatters, assuming the rights of the master of the house.

Conventional accounts tend to emphasise the benevolent rhetoric of the rulers, so it is necessary to present the evidence that refutes this liberal view. The rulers always claim to uphold democracy and peace, while they create foreign tyrants and start wars. Similarly, they claim to defend freedom and justice at home, while they back the autocratic owners of giant monopolies. No wonder that the great historian of the English Revolution, Christopher Hill, wrote of them, The bastards were always as bad as one suspected and worse than one would have thought possible. (Private communication, 7 November 1994.)

In his The Law of Peoples, John Rawls presented what he called "familiar and traditional principles of justice among free and democratic peoples:

1.   Peoples are free and independent, and their freedom and independence are to be respected by other people.

2.   Peoples are to observe treaties and undertakings.

3.   Peoples are equal and are parties to the agreements that bind them.

4.   Peoples are to observe a duty of non-intervention.

5.   Peoples have the right of self-defense but no right to instigate war for reasons other than self-defense.

6.   Peoples are to honor human rights.

7.   Peoples are to observe certain specified restrictions in the conduct of war.

8.   Peoples have a duty to assist other peoples living under unfavorable conditions that prevent their having a just or decent political and social regime."

As we will see throughout this book, the British state has regularly transgressed all these principles.

The state and its agents have always been aware of the vital importance of labelling, for example, ‘Interregnum’ not ‘Commonwealth’, ‘Indian Mutiny’ not ‘Indian War of Independence’, ‘Fall of Saigon’ not ‘Liberation of Saigon’. The level of control is high—the Radio Times would not print letters pointing out that there were alternative descriptions to their insistence on the ‘Fall of Saigon’. The common labels of Boer War, Korean War, Malayan Emergency, Vietnam War, Iraq War, imply that these wars erupted from the original warlike nature of the country’s people, omitting the names of the states that sent forces halfway round the world to attack the peoples of those countries.

The nature of Britain’s economy is vital to understanding foreign policy: a capitalist economy has generated a conflict-ridden foreign policy. The rulers’ focus of interest has been external not internal: overseas possessions (other people’s possessions), investments and real estate abroad. This has consistently damaged relations with other countries, and produced the two recurring types of wars: wars between empires or blocs, and wars against national liberation movements.

For these reasons, I have tried throughout to distinguish between the British people and British governments. British governments have consistently represented the interests of the minority who owned and controlled the means of production. They have as consistently opposed the interests of the overwhelming majority who have to work for a living, who constitute Britain. These rulers have also consistently opposed the interests of the overwhelming majority of the world’s people. Even today, they are still a powerful force in the world. The Empire may have declined from Lord Salisbury’s ‘gouty giant’ to Enoch Powell’s ‘empire of points’, but the same class, altered but not transformed, still rules.

The British people have not yet made foreign policy. We are not immediately responsible for it. Yet we need to ask whether we are responsible for government actions, and if so, in what sense. I think that we are, in a sense, responsible for the foreign policies pursued by British governments. Not in the sense that we benefit from the policies of overseas investment, colonialism and anti-socialism—we manifestly do not, only a tiny minority do. But we are responsible in the sense that we have permitted this tiny minority to rule, and misrule, in our name.

This book is written in the belief that knowing about Britain’s foreign policy can help us to solve some of Britain’s problems. The urgency of these problems demands clear thinking: I hope that this book may help to stimulate that necessary thought and debate.

Chapter 1

The Descent from Supremacy 1870-99

Introduction: ‘masters of the world’

During the nineteenth century, the British Empire won the race to control the world. It did so by fighting most of the ceaseless colonial wars that reduced the globe to possessions of the rulers of the richest European states.¹ These wars killed, according to a recent estimate, 5.5 million people. Despite the talk of Pax Britannica, there was not one year of peace throughout the Empire during Queen Victoria’s long reign: British armies fought over one hundred wars. These damaged the peoples of the declining Ottoman and Chinese empires, and of Africa and Asia. The Queen expressed what appeared to her to be the Imperial attitude, Nobody was to have anything anywhere but ourselves.² However, this position could not last: other powers sought their empires. As Winston Churchill told the House of Commons in 1914, We have got all we want in territory, but our claim to be left in undisputed enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions, largely acquired by war and largely maintained by force, is one which often seems less reasonable to others than to us.³

These wars were waged with the most brutal methods. Butcher and Bolt was the standard army technique. For instance, in the Afghan War of 1897-98, 44,000 troops laid waste the most fertile areas of the country, burning villages and crops, using dum-dum bullets, and taking no prisoners. In 1895, British forces razed Benin City in Nigeria. At Omdurman in 1898, the British Army massacred 12,000 people and suffered only 48 casualties. Churchill denounced Kitchener’s inhuman slaughter of the wounded after the battle. When British forces conquered Rhodesia in 1893-95, they stole the land and the cattle and laid waste the land. As Lord Blake wrote, White patrols had for many weeks been systematically burning kraals and destroying crops.⁴ When British forces conquered Burma, they slaughtered prisoners, destroyed villages, and impounded crops and cattle.⁵ The campaigns on India’s North-West Frontier were pitiless. Churchill wrote, After today we begin to burn villages. Every one. And all who resist will be killed without quarter. The (tribesmen) need a lesson—and there is no doubt we are a very cruel people.⁶ The British Empire painted the globe red in more senses than one.

As Churchill summed up, Empire meant ‘murdering natives and stealing their lands’. Sir Charles Eliot, High Commissioner, British East Africa, said in 1904, No doubt on platforms and in reports we declare that we have no intention of depriving natives of their lands, but this has never prevented us from taking whatever land we want.⁷

Section 1: Force and fraud

The British Empire’s pioneer industrial supremacy was the basis of this pioneer imperial supremacy.⁸ Britain’s industrial lead over the rest of the world, especially the world outside Europe, enabled its rulers to expand the Empire into the pre-industrial continents of Africa and Asia.⁹ In 1870, the British Empire was still the greatest power in the world.¹⁰ The City of London was the financial and commercial centre of the world economy.¹¹ Britain conducted a quarter of world trade, a trade based on the production of different goods in different areas: the advanced industrial economies produced manufactured goods, and sold their services—financial, shipping, insurance, banking—in exchange for the raw materials (minerals and foods) produced by the pre-industrial countries. British investors controlled other countries’ raw materials, their production and their prices.

British investors increasingly put their money into ventures overseas, rather than into expanding production in Britain, seeking the bigger profits gained abroad from cheaper labour power.¹² The shift in emphasis from manufacturing to overseas investment¹³ cut back Britain’s industrial lead.¹⁴ Investors opened new markets abroad, created communications to serve them, and bought cheap raw materials and cheap labour power. The imperial power had to use more force to ensure the regular payment of profits on capital than it did just to sell goods. It subsidised foreign allies. These actions constantly involved Britain in costly and risky external complications and in everlasting wars. As the American historian, and later President, Woodrow Wilson, wrote, The great East was the market all the world coveted now, the market for which statesmen as well as merchants must plan and play their game of competition, the market to which diplomacy, and if need be power, must make an open way.¹⁵

British taxpayers paid for the wars, which added to the poverty and misery caused by the original diversion of money from jobs at home to investment abroad. Growing unemployment forced huge numbers of workers to emigrate. Britain, the greatest exporter of capital, was also the greatest exporter of labour power. Most money and most emigrants went to the countries of the Empire. From 1879 to 1914, 10 million people, half of them between 18 and 30 years old, left Britain. Yet the economy was chronically unable to create jobs at home: even during this mass exodus, unemployment stayed at about 7%.

Other European countries became ‘Great Powers’ by following Britain’s lead.¹⁶ Germany, France, Austria-Hungary and Russia each formed large, consolidated and centralised nation-states, with large, urbanised populations, growing mechanised industrial economies and great wealth.¹⁷ These states (soon to be joined by the USA, Canada, Japan and Italy) had far more power than any other force of their time.¹⁸ Britain’s trading rivals put their money into their own industrial growth and became strong enough to break down Britain’s industrial monopoly. Their arrival threatened Britain’s economic and strategic predominance and upset the relations Britain had with other nations. Each state also sought to emulate Britain in gaining power abroad, over other peoples. They all applied Benjamin Disraeli’s maxim, The best mode of preserving wealth is power. Every state aimed to maintain and expand its wealth by extracting maximum profits from the peoples it controlled, by fraud or indirect rule when possible, by war or direct rule when required.

The British government was forced to come to an accommodation with the rising American empire. This allowed it to remove naval and military forces from the Western hemisphere. Later agreements with the Japanese and French governments enabled it to withdraw ships from the Far East and the Mediterranean.

In Europe, the German Empire won dominance, through its massive growth and concentration of production. It was newly unified and unhampered by empire. It also had huge productive forces, yet lacked the outlets for manufactured goods and investment that colonies provided. By 1900, Germany had gained the industrial leadership from Britain.¹⁹ Britain’s rate of capital formation was dropping; its proportion of capital invested abroad was rising: it was vice versa in Germany. Her victory over France in 1871 completed her rise as a united, centralised state. France’s defeat enabled Italy to unify itself, and helped Tsarist Russia resume her pressure on the Balkans. Faced by German domination, France, Belgium and Italy all looked overseas for compensatory expansion.

The arrival of all these new imperial powers caused great changes in the world and in their behaviour to each other. Their rivalry forced greater intervention²⁰ in matters of trade and finance,²¹ and in diplomacy and espionage. Britain’s rivals dropped free trade as well as laissez-faire, preferring to protect their industries while they were vulnerable.²² From the 1880s, the demands of trade and finance became the determining factors in diplomacy outside Europe and in imperial expansion, both formal and informal. British governments recognised the need for more official support for British trade and finance overseas. This meant more intervention in other countries’ financial affairs (for example, the Foreign Office’s founding of the National Bank of Turkey in 1909) and a more active role in maintaining the Imperial frontiers and communications needed to police the worldwide British trading system.

British governments increasingly protected British contractors, concessionaires, monopolies and employers’ associations, like the Corporation of Foreign Bondholders, founded in 1868, which became universally acknowledged as the representative of those British investors, and the China Association, founded by British and Chinese employers in 1889. As Lord Salisbury told the London Chamber of Commerce in 1889, Our greatest duty is to provide the material for defending the splendid commerce which your enterprise has created.²³ In 1895, he said, It is our business in all these new countries to make smooth the paths for British commerce, British enterprise, the application of British capital. As he explained, we only desire territory because we desire commercial freedom. Joseph Chamberlain, Colonial Secretary from 1895 to 1903, said, The Foreign Office and the Colonial Office are chiefly engaged in finding new markets and in defending old ones. The controlled foreign markets helped the British government to stave off her new competitors.

All these competing states increasingly wielded the weapons of force and fraud. They used force in naval and military aggression and in settlement—the jobless became client settlers, in colonies and bases, garrisons and enclaves across the world. They used fraud in the shape of armies of Christian missionaries: there were 61,000 in Africa, Asia and the Pacific in 1900.²⁴ George Bernard Shaw wrote of the part played by Christian missionaries in reconciling the black races of Africa to their subjugation by European Capitalism.²⁵ As Kenya’s first Prime Minister, Jomo Kenyatta, wrote, When the missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the missionaries the Bible. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.

Jostled by the new rival states, Britain’s rulers constantly prepared for war. Just as they had used force to gain the Empire, so they were ready to use force to keep it. They used its advantages of industrial strength, naval supremacy, military and diplomatic experience, and fastened a chain of bases and garrisons around the world. The race for Empire, won by ruthless aggression, became an armaments race. Britain’s Naval Defence Act of 1889, which arrogantly and ruinously asserted that the Royal Navy must always be larger than the next two largest navies added together, pushed the other powers to emulation. In 1889, the Army gained an even greater superiority in fire-power over all non-European nations when it began to use the single-barrelled Maxim gun, firing eleven shots a second.

When the other powers started their grabs for colonies, Britain’s rulers acted aggressively to minimise their rivals’ shares of the remaining spoils and to secure their own previous gains.²⁶ With all its advantages, the British Empire largely won the competition in conquest: it grew from 2.5 million square miles in 1860 to 7.7 million in 1880 and to 9.3 million in 1899. It gained control in South Africa, the Gold Coast, the Malay States and the Pacific (through the War of the Pacific 1879-81).²⁷ In the Middle East, the Royal Navy and the Indian Army gave Britain the power of ‘authoritative advice’, as Prime Minister Archibald Rosebery said. By 1900, the Empire covered a fifth of the world’s surface and ruled a quarter of its people. The rival states completely divided up the world.

Britain, first to industrialise and first into decline and obsolescence, could still grab huge regular profits for investors from her Empire (although the living standards of the people did not derive from dividends from Empire but from their work in industry). Her political and economic control over her colonies enabled her to strangle potential rivals’ moves to develop independence and industry (as in Ireland, Egypt and India).²⁸ As we turn now to examine British policy towards Turkey, China, Africa, India and Ireland, we shall see how British governments tried to stay on top.

Section 2: Carving up the Ottomans

The British government’s alliance with the decaying and corrupt Ottoman Empire was designed to keep Tsarist Russia out of Eastern Europe and to maintain British financial influence there.²⁹ But France’s defeat by Germany in 1871 weakened the British government’s position by removing the French government as an effective ally for interfering in Eastern Europe.

In 1875, the Sultan of Turkey became bankrupt. The rulers of Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary recommended reforms to the Turks, each hoping to plunder the ruins. In 1876, Prime Minister Disraeli responded to further pressure on Turkey by offering its government full diplomatic support³⁰ and sending the fleet to Besika Bay. This left the British government isolated against the other five major European states. That summer, the Sultan massacred tens of thousands of his European subjects. Unruffled by this, the Conservative government carried on supporting the Turkish government and sabotaged a peace conference, helping to bring about the Russo-Turkish war of 1877. At the 1878 Berlin Conference, Disraeli helped the Turkish government to regain control of Macedonia (which led to the renewed Balkan wars of national liberation of 1912). He also helped the Austria-Hungarian Empire to grab Bosnia and Herzegovina (which led to renewed quarrels between that Empire and Russia, culminating in the war of 1914-18). British governments consistently backed the dying autocracies against the national liberation struggles of the peoples of the Balkans.³¹ They continued to do so even after Turkish forces massacred thousands of Armenians in 1894 and 1904.

The Anglo-Turkish Convention of 1878 sought to strengthen the Turkish Empire with greater military support and promises of co-operation in reform. The people of Crete wanted to end Turkish misrule and unite with Greece, not with Russia, the supposed enemy of the Convention. But in 1897, the British government sent warships and an army of occupation to crush the popular rising. Churchill commented, What an atrocious crime the Government have committed in Crete. That British warships should lead the way in protecting the blood-bespattered Turkish soldiery from the struggles of their victims is too horrible to contemplate… We are doing a very wicked thing in firing on the Cretan insurgents… so that she (Greece) cannot succour them.³² The people of Crete achieved union with Greece in 1913, over the British government’s opposition. A volunteer British Legion fought for the Greek people, restoring Britain’s honour, much as the British members of the International Brigade did in the war in Spain in the 1930s.

The British Empire achieved dominance over much of Turkey’s possessions in the Arab Middle East, trying to prise away its valuable assets, especially Kuwait, which was part of Iraq. From 1534 to 1919, Iraq was part of the Ottoman Empire, united as the single eyalet of Baghdad. British records identified Kuwait as a department of Basra, the southern part of Iraq. The regional market tied Kuwait to southern Iraq. In 1872, the Reuters Concession granted British subjects a monopoly over all Iraq’s economic and financial resources. In 1892, Lord Curzon recognised that Kuwait owed allegiance to Turkey. In 1893, the British Ambassador to Istanbul acknowledged Ottoman sovereignty over the whole coast from Basra to Qatif, including Kuwait.

But in the 1890s, British authorities in London and in India and their associates in British and Indian financial circles aimed to seize control of Kuwait. So the British government backed Mubarak’s efforts to break Kuwait away from Turkish sovereignty, sending men-of-war to support his May 1896 coup. He killed his two brothers, one of whom was the Sheikh, and proclaimed himself Sheikh.

Britain’s rulers separated Kuwait from the developing productive forces in the region.³³ They also split Kuwait from the emerging Arab national movement and from its growing ties with Ottoman Iraq. In January 1899, Britain’s rulers illegally seized control of Kuwait and imposed a secret agreement on Mubarak. This acknowledged the Turkish government’s sovereignty over Kuwait, yet hypocritically stipulated that no territory could be alienated from Kuwait without the British government’s consent. In 1903, the British government proclaimed, if any other power established a naval base or fortified port in the Persian Gulf, Britain would regard it as a grave menace to her interests and would resist with all the means at her disposal.

Britain’s rulers linked Kuwait even more firmly into their worldwide Empire in 1904 by appointing their first Political Agent there. In May 1913, the British government explicitly recognised Turkish suzerainty over Kuwait. In November 1914, after the Turkish government entered the war on Germany’s side, the British government declared Kuwait to be ‘an independent state under British protection’.

Section 3: Plundering China

In Asia too, the British Empire played a leading role in the intense struggle for partition and plunder.³⁴ Lord Clarendon observed in 1870, British interests in China are strictly commercial, or at all events only so far political as they may be for the protection of commerce.³⁵ This commerce notoriously included the opium trade, ‘the most long-continued and systematic crime of modern times’.³⁶ Colonialism generally depended on the production and export of drug crops—tobacco, sugar, tea, coffee and opium.

Throughout the 19th century, the British state relied on producing opium in India and exporting it to China to pay for its ever more costly presence in India and for its imperial stepping-stones in Singapore and Hong Kong.³⁷ Between 1800 and 1810, the Indian government allowed the East India Company to export 32 tons, 4,000 chests, of opium a year to China, between 1821 and 1828, 8,000 chests a year and between 1835 and 1847, 30,000 chests a year. By the 1830s, opium was the largest commerce of the time in any single commodity.³⁸ In the late 1840s, the Company exported 40,000 chests a year to China, in the late 1850s, 60,000. In 1860, the Indian government (on British government orders) legalised India’s narcotics trade with China as a government monopoly, run by the Opium Department. By then, opium was India’s second biggest export, after cotton, and most was sold to China. (In 1876, cotton exports were worth £13.3 million and 87,000 chests of opium worth £11.1 million were exported.) In 1880, the Indian government exported 80,000 chests of opium, 6,500 tons, to China. Between 1881 and 1905, it exported 50,000 chests a year to China. From 1865 to 1910, it made an average of £4 million a year from its opium sales, its second largest source of revenue, after the land tax.

Revenue from the opium trade financed all the colonies in Southeast Asia. For example, as late as the 1930s, it still provided between 40% and 60% of Singapore’s revenue. All the colonial governments of Southeast Asia, and the British government itself, promoted, protected and profited from the trade.

Naval power enabled the British government to win commercial and diplomatic pre-eminence in China by 1890, but it needed new alliances to hold this position against Tsarist Russia’s drive to the East. So, in 1894, Salisbury’s government came to an agreement with the Japanese government. This enabled the Japanese government, just two weeks later, to make its first successful attack on China and to attack and occupy Korea. In 1896, the Chinese government sought loans from British-controlled banks to pay the war’s costs. The British government already controlled the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs, 80% of China’s foreign trade and the bulk of her industrial enclaves through the China Association.

The 1894 war also damaged China’s unity; it ended the Treaty system organised through the central Chinese government. The European states hoped this would lead to the colonisation of China, but the Chinese people’s ‘Boxer’ rebellion prevented this. The 1894 war began the ‘Battle for Concessions’, which the British government won by the swift threat of war on China, We shall regard their breach of faith concerning the Peking-Hankow Railway as an act of deliberate hostility against this country and shall act accordingly. The British government gained concessions for 2,800 miles of railway, as much as Russia, Germany, France and the USA got together. So the great Yangtze basin, the richest part of China, became a British sphere of influence. The Peking Syndicate, the Britain and China Corporation and the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank (founded in 1898) were the instruments of British financial rule. The British government collaborated with client feudal warlords to keep control. The Foreign Office organised the joint intervention to crush the Boxer rebels, and Indian Army troops played a major part in the barbarous repression and reprisals, and in the burning of the Summer Palace in Peking.

Section 4: Pillaging Africa

As in the other parts of the Empire, British colonialism in Africa existed to expatriate the surplus; it was a system of pillage, of single-minded extraction of Africa’s mineral wealth.³⁹ Africa’s productive forces were chained to the rapacious demands of foreign rulers, who had no interest in developing manufacture, technology or a home market in Africa. The product of the African people’s labour power was never invested in Africa. Wages were driven down to the barest minimum, to maximise profits at the point of production, while the prices of their products were held down to minimise raw material costs to the buyers, largely British companies.

This economic essence of Empire was clothed in various forms, depending on Britain’s relationship with other powers. Early in the 19th century, when British predominance was unchallenged, political control was not always needed. As a free trader said in 1846, Foreign nations would become valuable Colonies to us, without imposing on us the responsibility of governing them.⁴⁰ Later, it became necessary to take direct control of foreign nations to pre-empt European rivals.⁴¹

In 1839-41, the British government broke Egypt’s attempt to industrialise by flooding Egypt’s home market with temporarily under-priced goods. Her independent development thwarted, Egypt was opened to foreign, chiefly British, investment and forced to borrow money. The interest on these loans grew apace; by the 1870s, Egypt had to pay £6 million a year interest from a total state income of £10 million a year. This vast indebtedness imposed a huge burden of taxation on the people, reducing them to such poverty that in 1878 there was a terrible famine. The intolerable oppression helped bring a nationalist government to power.

In order to overthrow this Egyptian government, Gladstone’s Liberal government launched a savage undeclared war on Egypt in 1882. Naval forces bombarded Alexandria, destroying much of the city.⁴² Gladstone sent 25,000 troops, costing £2.3 million. As he said, the bondholders’ interests must be protected.⁴³ He himself was a bondholder, owning shares in the Suez Canal Company.⁴⁴ Queen Victoria said, Short of annexation we must obtain a firm hold and power in Egypt for the future. So, the Empire annexed Egypt, to protect the Suez Canal Company; its forces then intervened in the Sudan, to defeat the nationalists there, and it increasingly interfered in the Gulf States, to protect Egypt.

Egypt became tied hand and foot, unable to move, as Alfred Milner, High Commissioner of the Cape, boasted. New investment flooded in, and more loans and higher taxes. The British government endlessly promised to withdraw from Egypt (66 official promises in 40 years), but only if ‘law and order’ was completely restored. Even if this had been achieved, the policy was to stay, because the government saw Egypt as the key to the whole Empire. As the Director of Naval Intelligence told the Cabinet in October 1896, the one way in which England could hold India… is holding Egypt against all comers. Also, Britain’s rulers began to see Palestine as a key bulwark to the Empire’s new position in Egypt.⁴⁵

The Empire’s attacks on Egypt and the Sudan had disastrous effects on the whole of North Africa and the Middle East. The wars and occupations crushed the nationalists’ efforts to achieve independence and reform, and the countries’ peoples were forced to endure famine, disease and endemic warfare.⁴⁶

The British government’s war against Egypt was the opening shot in the carve-up of Africa. The continent became the scene of a gigantic competitive speculation in mining futures. In 1890, the General Act of the Brussels Conference mandated the European powers to occupy and govern the interior of Africa ‘to suppress the slave trade’. The Belgian government suppressed this evil trade in the Congo by proceeding to massacre the people of that unfortunate country. Between 1891 and 1911, Belgian forces directed by King Leopold of Belgium killed about ten million Congolese. The British government for years helped Leopold to conceal his genocidal acts. British officials and officers in and near the Congo reported the killings, but The whole of these official reports were suppressed lock, stock and barrel.⁴⁷ In 1913, the British government recognised Leopold’s annexation of the Congo.

The British Empire was an ally of Portugal, so it was complicit in the slavery that had been the foundation of the Portuguese empire since the 15th century. Even in the early 1900s, Angola was still a slave state, with half its people enslaved. In the 1900s, the British Empire was trying to recruit African labour from Portuguese Africa for South Africa’s gold mines. Both Britain and Portugal ignored the treaties obliging them to act to halt the slave trade: Prime Minister Lord Salisbury advised, Leave it alone.⁴⁸

During the 1890s, the British Empire pressed on with its brutal one-sided wars of colonial aggression. In 1896, Zanzibar was bombarded into submission. The same year, the Abyssinians defeated the army of the British government’s ally Italy at Adowa; within ten days, the British government ordered General Kitchener to invade East Sudan as a pre-emptive strike against a possible move by the French government against Egypt, and also as a riposte on Italy’s behalf. Sudan was reconquered in 1898 after the massacre at Omdurman. In 1896, Leander Starr Jameson organised a war against the Matabele, to found ‘Rhodesia’.⁴⁹ This was the first war in which the Maxim gun was used: Jameson’s forces killed 3,000 people, and lost only four. In 1897, the Hausa state was conquered. In 1898, the Gold Coast, Nigeria and Kenya were taken; in Kenya, all the land was declared forfeit to the Empire.

In the 1890s, the British government’s hold over Southern Africa was weakening. The destruction of the Zulu state in 1879 had led to the annexation of the Transvaal, but the Boers became increasingly powerful within the sub-continent. Their two Afrikaner Republics, achieved as a result of their victory over British forces at Majuba Hill in February 1881, would not fit easily into the British government’s scheme for a unified South Africa. By the London Treaty of 1884, the British government had promised not to interfere in the newly self-governing Boer Republics, including Transvaal. But the discovery of gold there in 1886 raised the stakes and altered the composition of the population.

The British government wanted to get the Transvaal back, through war if necessary.⁵⁰ Within southern Africa, the gold millionaires played the key role, allying with the British government to bring about the war. Supporters of the war boasted that it would cut wages, and that the company Consolidated Gold would gain £2.2 million in value at once and that its annual dividend would rise by 45%. The war was not the result of a British-Boer conflict over the rights of the black population: neither side had any interest in them. In 1887, Cecil Rhodes, the Prime Minister of Cape Colony, told the House of Assembly in Cape Town, These are my politics on native affairs, and these are the politics of South Africa… The native is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise… We must adopt a system of despotism, such as works so well in India, in our relations with the barbarians of South Africa.⁵¹

So the British government decided to defeat the Boers by force. As a first step, it launched the Jameson Raid in 1895.⁵² (Jameson had been appointed the administrator of Southern Rhodesia in 1894.) Joseph Chamberlain, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, cabled Rhodes, hurry things along. Chamberlain wrote to Lord Salisbury on December 26, 1895, If the rising is successful, it ought to turn to our advantage. This disposes of the myths that those two had no prior knowledge of the raid.⁵³ The government hoped that this armed attack by a small force would provoke an anti-Boer uprising, but it did not.

In 1898, the British government persuaded the German government not to oppose her aggressive policy in South Africa. (They also agreed to support the Portuguese empire in Africa, while secretly agreeing to partition it if Portuguese rule collapsed. This did not stop the British government’s promising Portugal in 1899 to defend her colonies.) The 1899 agreement also included a clause looking forward to the war on the Boers: the Portuguese government pledged not to send arms to the Transvaal.

The British government increased the pressure on the Boers. Milner wrote in a public dispatch of 1898 that the case for British intervention was overwhelming. In 1899, more British troops were posted to the Transvaal border despite, or because of, advice from the former Commander-in-Chief at the Cape that the Boers would see this as a deliberate provocation. We shall see in the next chapter how Britain’s rulers continued to scheme to bring about the war against the Boers.

Section 5: Misruling India

Rhodes had praised the ‘system of despotism’ that the Empire imposed on India. This was consistently expressed: Sir John Malcolm, Governor of Bombay, wrote in 1826, Our government… is essentially military.⁵⁴ Sir James Fitzjames Stephen wrote in 1883 that the Raj was founded not on consent but on conquest, implying the superiority of ‘the conquering race’.⁵⁵ Lord James Bryce wrote in 1912, The government of India by the English resembles that of her possessions by Rome in being virtually despotic.⁵⁶

India, like Africa, suffered the blight of Empire. Until the end of the 18th century, India had been a net exporter of manufactured goods. The Empire had crushed this possible rival and enforced dependency and decline. It allowed limited industrial growth in the second half of the century, when companies in a few industrial enclaves exploited cheap Indian labour at high rates of profit. India, throughout Imperial rule, remained an exporter of profit. Indian labour enriched Britain’s rulers and its aristocratic Indian clients. No economic benefit accrued to the Indian or the British peoples.⁵⁷ It is estimated that between 1830 and 1900 India’s income per head fell by 65%.

India also became a net exporter of food on a huge scale. Annual exports of food grains increased in value from £858,000 in 1849 to £9.3 million in 1901.⁵⁸ At the same time, the British rulers of India presided over increasingly horrifying famines. Between 1800 and 1850, there had been seven famines, in which about 1.5 million Indians died; between 1850 and 1900, there were famines nearly every year, in which possibly 50 million Indians died. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 was a disaster for India: after it opened, India was forced to export increasing amounts of wheat to Britain via the Canal, so the wheat was no longer available as a reserve in times of scarcity. Only once in all those years did the Indian government conduct a generous and successful famine relief effort, in Bihar in 1874 when Lord Northbrook’s instructions were to save all lives at any cost. His administration imported and distributed 450,000 tons of grain from Burma. All those needing either jobs or charitable relief were reached. The annual land revenue demand was remitted. Spending on famine relief was £6 million. Sir Richard Temple, who managed this effort, said that those who advocated relying on the profit motive alone were quite forgetting that under such a process the poorest classes would perish.

In 1877, there was a devastating famine in Bombay. 5.25 million people died. The government had instructed Lord Lytton and Sir John Strachey above all to save money on famine relief. Preventing ‘dependency’ seemed to be more important than preventing death; free trade overrode the moral imperative of saving life. So money was saved by suspending rather than remitting the land revenue demand and by imposing a series of tests on the privations of those in poorhouses and on relief works. Relief was stringently restricted and a policy of laisser-faire was rigidly applied to the grain trade. The government refused to buy grain to feed the starving. Consequently, 1877 was, just as 1876 had been, a record year of exports of India’s food grains. The government’s total spending on famine relief from 1876 to 1878 was just £1.14 million.

In both Bihar in 1874 and Bombay in 1877, the famine-stricken people were reluctant to take up relief and were eager to return to their farms. People became dependent on relief in Bombay, though not in Bihar, because so little relief was offered so late. Any ‘dependency’ was a product of extreme poverty and hunger, rather than of too much relief.⁵⁹

In 1880, British officials in India drafted the Indian Famine Codes. These promoted the dogma that the least intervention was the best, despite the evidence from Bihar. But the Codes’ policies of minimal intervention, the sanctity of free trade and the avoidance of ‘dependency’ became the norm, and are still upheld today all too often, whenever governments are supposed to respond to famines. The Codes did nothing to prevent famine. The famines of 1896-97 and 1899-1901 were as severe as any in the decades before 1880.⁶⁰ George Curzon, India’s Viceroy between 1899 and 1905, said, any government, which by indiscriminate alms-giving, weakened the fibre and demoralized the self-reliance of the population would be guilty of a public crime.⁶¹ Arthur Balfour, the Foreign Secretary, deprecated subsidies to India in times of famine: when asked if a famine causing the deaths of 20 million Indians was not a case of extreme necessity, he coolly replied, It is not financial necessity.⁶²

India’s people suffered appalling poverty. Curzon estimated India’s national income in 1901 as £2 per head a year, i.e., 1¼ pence a day. This was somewhat unequally distributed, as 1% of the population, the landlords, got 33% of the wealth, while 60% of the population got only 30%. India’s population rose by only 18.9% from 1870 to 1910, compared to a 45.4% rise in Europe. This proves that ‘over-population’ did not cause her poverty. India’s wealth was pillaged and her agriculture starved, in order to rack up profits and rents. The profits went to British investors, the rents to the Empire’s allies, the landlords, both of whom wasted the surplus on conspicuous consumption in their different styles. As a supporter of the Raj naïvely noted, The administrators of India… have paid hardly any attention to the fundamental cause of poverty in India… strange to say, there is one great fundamental cause of widespread misery and untold suffering among the natives, the removal of which never seems to have been taken into consideration… I refer to the atrocious usury system which crushes the producers in India, which renders their life a burden, which compels British officials and British soldiers to act the part of extortionists against the poor debtors on behalf of the merciless usurers.⁶³

Section 6: Ruining Ireland

Ireland also suffered from Empire, and suffered even more, being so close to its centre. In the eighteenth century, she started to develop into an industrial nation. People began to develop industrial handicrafts in rural areas; working people learnt and applied new skills in the growing industrial base in the towns. But in 1826, the British government, seeking to prevent the growth of a rival, deflated the Irish economy, causing a slump. This robbed farmers of the means of technical development and stopped them from producing new and diverse crops. Britain’s rulers imposed, as John Mitchel, the Irish patriot, wrote in 1848, What we know in Ireland as the English political economy, or the Famine Political Economy! Nearly a third of Ireland’s people died of hunger during the worst famine—while British traders continued to export grain from Ireland. James Connolly, the trade union organiser and Irish nationalist, wrote, the English administration of Ireland during the famine was a colossal crime against the human race.

As a result of industrial decline, the wealthy few, British or Irish, sent their money to Britain or kept it locked up either in landownership (750 landowners owned half of Ireland) or in banks (where £60 millions were lying idle in 1860). The textile industry, the base of the earlier industrial resilience, was hard hit: the number of workers in the industry declined from 700,000 in 1841 to 130,000 in 1881. Ireland’s economy became more and more backward and dependent on Britain.

However, the Irish people were not prepared to accept this as their own fault—they knew that the British Empire was to blame for Ireland’s miseries and they sought to leave the Empire. In 1870, they founded the Home Rule League to spread the idea of Irish independence. In 1879-1882, they rose in armed revolt against their oppressors. The British government sent troops to defend the rule of the landlords, and successfully solicited the aid of the Vatican against the Irish people. In the 1885 elections, supporters of Home Rule won 85 out of 103 seats, and also won the majority of votes in Ulster. The British government sought to destroy the national movement by dividing it on religious lines. As the Anglican Bishop of Armagh had written in 1793 of the Irish nation’s resistance to British repression, The worst of this is it stands to unite Protestant and Papist, and whenever that happens, goodbye to the English interest in Ireland forever.

Conclusion: the growing costs of empire

The last three decades of the nineteenth century saw the Empire’s rulers gain unprecedented wealth; their agents extracted riches from all parts of the earth. The Empire’s global reach and territorial possessions were unparalleled. The benefits to the rulers were obvious. But the costs and the threats to Britain were increasing. The growing burden of empire, the bitter rivalry with the rulers of rising empires, the attempted destruction of the declining Ottoman and Chinese empires, the pillaging of Africa, India and Ireland, were all storing up hatreds and