Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
CONCLUSION
Acknowledgements
ILLUSTRATION
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
Copyright Page
For Ken and Vivienne
The old river in its broad reach rested
unruffled at the decline of
day, after ages of good service done to the
race that peopled its
banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a
waterway leading to
the uttermost ends of the earth ... The tidal
current runs to and
fro in its unceasing service, crowded with
memories of men and
ships it had borne to the rest of home or to
the battles of the sea.
It had known and served all the men of
whom the nation is
proud ... It had borne all the ships whose
names are like jewels
flashing in the night of time ... It had known
the ships and the
men. They had sailed from Deptford, from
Greenwich, from
Erith – the adventurers and the settlers;
kings’ ships and the ships
of men on ’Change; captains, admirals, the
dark ‘interlopers’ of
the Eastern trade, and the commissioned
‘generals’ of East India
fleets. Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame,
they all had gone out
on that stream, bearing the sword, and often
the torch, messen-
gers of the might within the land, bearers of
a spark from the sa-
cred fire. What greatness had not floated on
the ebb of that river
into the mystery of an unknown earth! ... The
dreams of men,
the seed of commonwealths, the germs of
empires ...
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
INTRODUCTION
WHY BRITAIN?
WHITE PLAGUE
afford[ed] me no encouragement,
alleging that, as this is a civil war,
if I should fall into the hands of the
British the gallows will be my fate
... The Tories assail[ed] me with
the following: ‘Young man, are you
sensible you are about to violate
your duty to the best of kings, and
run headlong into destruction? Be
assured that this rebellion will be
of short duration’.
THE MISSION
As he concluded in a peroration
carefully crafted to stir the youthful
ardour of his audience:
HEAVEN’S BREED
MAXIM FORCE
Pears’ Soap
It did.
Not only was imperialism immoral,
argued the critics. According to the
Radicals, it was also a rip-off: paid for
by British taxpayers, fought for by
British soldiers, but benefiting only a
tiny elite of fat-cat millionaires, the likes
of Rhodes and Rothschild. That was the
thrust of J. A. Hobson’s profoundly
influential Imperialism: A Study,
published in 1902. ‘Every great political
act’, argued Hobson, ‘must receive the
sanction and the practical aid of this
little group of financial kings’:
As speculators or financial dealers
they constitute ... the gravest single
factor in the economics of
Imperialism ... Each condition ... of
their profitable business ... throws
them on the side of Imperialism ...
There is not a war ... or any other
public shock, which is not gainful
to these men; they are harpies who
suck their gains from every sudden
disturbance of public credit ... The
wealth of these houses, the scale of
their operations, and their
cosmopolitan organization make
them the prime determinants of
economic policy. They have the
largest definite stake in the business
of Imperialism, and the amplest
means of forcing their will upon the
policy of nations ... [F]inance is ...
the governor of the imperial engine,
directing the energy and
determining the work.
1 lb. of
AUSTRA
sultanas.....................................
1 lb. of
AUSTRA
currants.....................................
1 lb. of stoned SOUTH
raisins............................. AFRICA
6 ozs. of minced
CANAD
apple...........................
1 lb. of UNITED
breadcrumbs............................. KINGDO
1 lb. of beef suet NEW
.................................... ZEALAN
6 ozs. of candied peel SOUTH
............................ AFRICA
8 ozs. of flour UNITED
....................................... KINGDO
4 eggs IRISH FR
................................................... STATE
½ of ground cinnamon
CEYLON
.........................
½ of ground cloves
ZANZIB
...............................
½ of ground nutmegs STRAIT
........................... SETTLE
1 pinch pudding spice
INDIA
...........................
1 tbsp. brandy
CYPRUS
......................................
2 tbsps. rum JAMAIC
..........................................
1 pint old beer
ENGLAN
......................................
I dreamed of a world-wide
brotherhood with the background of
a common race and creed,
consecrated to the service of peace;
Britain enriching the rest out of her
culture and traditions, and the spirit
of the Dominions like a strong wind
freshening the stuffiness of the old
lands ... We believed that we were
laying the basis of a federation of
the world ... The ‘white man’s
burden’ is now an almost
meaningless phrase; then it
involved a new philosophy of
politics, and an ethical standard,
serious and surely not ignoble.
47
The covenanted Civil Service was
known as such because its members
entered a covenant with the Secretary of
State of India. For most of the nineteenth
century it had around 900 members.
Only in the twentieth century did the
number of ICS officers rise significantly
above a thousand. In 1939 there were
1,384. Nor was this skeletal staffing
unique to India. The entire
administrative elite of the African
colonial service – spread over a dozen
colonies with a population of around 43
million – numbered just over 1,200. The
Malayan civil service had 220
administrators for 3.2 million people,
which by Indian standards was chronic
overmanning.
48
Especially under the Empire-minded
mastership of Benjamin Jowett, Balliol
became the college of choice for would-
be proconsuls. Between 1874 and 1914
no fewer than 27 per cent of Balliol
graduates were employed in the Empire.
49
It is fashionable to allege that the British
authorities did nothing to relieve the
drought-induced famines of the period.
But this is not so. In 1874 H. M. Kisch,
an ICS magistrate of the Second Class,
was sent to organize famine relief in an
area of Behar covering 198 square miles
and a population of around 100,000.
‘Since I came here’, he wrote home
proudly, ‘I have erected 15 government
grain store-houses, and opened about 22
relief works, I give employment to about
15,000 men and women per day, and am
feeding gratuitously about 3,000 more. I
have full authority to do what I choose,
and I do it’. The calamity of 1877 was
due to a failure to adopt the same
methods.
50
There were only 31,000 British in India
in 1805 (of whom 22,000 were in the
army, 2,000 in civil government and
7,000 in the private sector). By 1931
there were 168,000 in all: 60,000 in the
army and police, 4,000 in civil
government and 60,000 employed in the
private sector. In 1881 the British in
India numbered 89,778 in total.
51
The third son of a Whipsnade curate,
Eyre had been the first white man to
walk across the Australian desert from
Adelaide to Moorundie. Ironically, in
the light of subsequent events at Morant
Bay, his reward for this feat of
exploration and endurance was to be
made Magistrate and Protector of the
Aborigines in the area. Today a lake, a
peninsula and the motorway between
Adelaide and Perth are all named after
him.
52
No one considered for a moment that this
might best be achieved by allowing them
to be properly represented in the
Assembly and magistracy.
53
The term Anglo-Indian is sometimes
used, confusingly, to denote people of
mixed British and Indian parentage. I
have preferred to follow the Victorian
practice of using ‘Anglo-Indian’ to refer
to British long-term residents in India
and ‘Eurasian’ to refer to the issue of
ethnically mixed unions.
54
This was not the case in the cities of
Bombay, Calcutta and Madras.
55
One possible source of sexual anxiety
was the awareness that the supposedly
clear line between ‘White and Black’
was in reality quite blurred. After two
centuries of contact with Europeans,
there was a substantial mixed race
population, usually referred to as
‘Eurasians’, who were often employed
in low-level public sector jobs
(particularly on the railways and
telegraphs). Revulsion against
‘miscegenation’ was an important feature
of the later Victorian period: Kipling
devotes at least two short stories to the
‘fact’ that the hue of a woman’s
fingernails was the best guide to the
purity of her breeding (a darkness to the
semicircles along the base of the nail
spelling ostracism). One Indian-born
soldier who won notoriety after the First
World War heard his mother exclaim
when his father lit his cigarette from a
Burmese girl’s cheroot: ‘That sort of
looseness is what has peopled Simla
with thirty thousand Eurasians!’ The fact
that the majority of such liaisons were
between white men and Indian women
did not stop people fantasizing about
inter-racial sex with the genders
reversed.
56
Congress was founded by Allan
Octavian Hume, a Liberal ICS man who
had been sickened by the anti-Ilbert
campaign.
57
He was most concisely satirized in
verse: ‘My name is George Nathaniel
Curzon, / I am a most superior person, /
My cheek is pink, my hair is sleek, / I
dine at Blenheim once a week’.
58
And it was not just the fact that (as
Machonochie observed) many of the
Indian princes privately resented the
‘schoolmasterly’ way Curzon was
inclined to treat them. Curzon even
managed to upset them at the moment of
their apotheosis at the Durbar by failing
to return their visits.
59
It was a grave blow to the self-esteem of
the British literary elite when Tagore
was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1913. George Bernard
Shaw sneered at ‘Stupendranath Begorr’
– a cheap dig that illustrates how
widespread the aversion to educated
Bengalis had become.
60
From 21 years to 32. However, in the
same period (between 1820 and 1950),
British life expectancy increased from
40 to 69 years.
61
That changed in the inter-war years
however. By 1945 Indian mills supplied
three-quarters of domestic consumption.
62
It is, however, quite unjustifiable to
compare British reliance on the free
market in the famine of 1877 with the
Nazi policy of genocide against the
Jews. The Viceroy, Lord Lytton, was
certainly wrong to imagine that market
forces would suffice to feed the starving
after the catastrophic drought of 1876.
But his intention was not murderous,
which Hitler’s was.
63
‘To have found a great people sunk in the
lowest depths of slavery and
superstition, to have ruled them as to
have made them desirous and capable of
all the privileges of citizens, would
indeed be a title to glory all our own’.
64
Even so, the fact that someone has
bashed off her nose still seems strangely
sacrilegious.
65
Nathaniel Rothschild was elevated to the
peerage in 1885, the first Jew to enter
the House of Lords. He is referred to
throughout this chapter as Lord
Rothschild.
66
Lugard was the son of two missionaries
who had joined the Indian Army after
failing the Indian Civil Service exam.
He had gone to Africa after catching his
wife in bed with another man, which
caused him to lose his faith in God (not
to mention his wife).
67
By January 1876 the share price had
risen from £22 10s 4d to £34 12s 6d, a
50 per cent increase. The market value
of the government’s stake was £24
million in 1898, £40 million on the eve
of the First World War and £93 million
by 1935 (around £528 a share). Between
1875 and 1895, the government received
its £200,000 a year from Cairo;
thereafter it was paid proper dividends,
which rose from £690,000 in 1895 to
£880,000 in 1901.
68
What Bismarck said to the explorer
Eugen Wolff was this: ‘Your map of
Africa is all very fine, but my map of
Africa lies in Europe. Here is Russia
and here’ – pointing to the left – ‘is
France, and we are in the middle; that is
my map of Africa’.
69
The countries represented were Austria-
Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, France,
Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the
Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Spain,
Sweden, Turkey and the United States.
Significantly, not a single African
representative was present, despite the
fact that at this stage less than a fifth of
the continent was under European rule.
70
The New Hebrides were governed
jointly with France.
71
In 1867 Canada, Nova Scotia and New
Brunswick were united to form ‘One
Dominion under the Name of Canada’, to
which the other Canadian provinces
gradually acceded. From 1907 the status
of Dominion was extended to all the
self-governing colonies of white
settlement.
72
Radical nationalism often attracted its
strongest adherents from the periphery of
the European empires; in this the Greater
Britain movement had something in
common with the contemporary Pan
German League. Milner himself was
brought up in Germany, while his most
loyal acolyte, Leo Amery, was born in
India of (though he kept it quiet)
Hungarian Jewish parentage. Another
relative outsider, the Scottish novelist
John Buchan, formed part of their circle.
The idea of Greater Britain is nowhere
more appealingly expressed than in his
novels.
73
India baffled Chamberlain. It seemed to
him, he wrote in 1897, ‘to be between
the Devil and the deep sea – on the one
hand most serious danger of attack from
outside & internal disturbance unless
full preparations are made – & on the
other the prospect of most serious
financial embarrassment’. A man who
liked foreign cities the more they
resembled Birmingham was unlikely to
be captivated by Calcutta.
74
Gladstone himself made the analogy
explicit: ‘Canada did not get Home Rule
because she was loyal and friendly, but
she has become loyal and friendly
because she has got Home Rule’. This
was quite right, but the Liberal Unionists
were deaf to reason.
75
Paradoxically, however, there were few
bastions of Unionist sentiment more
staunch than Canada. As early as 1870
Ontario had 900 Orange Lodges,
pledged to ‘resist all attempts to ...
dismember the British Empire’.
76
Motto: ‘Many Countries, but One
Empire’. The League had 7,000
members in 1900.
77
Curzon regarded tiger shooting as the
greatest of all the perks of being
Viceroy, and took a particularly
egregious pleasure in being
photographed bestriding his victims. As
he described it breathlessly to his father:
‘You can hear your heart beat as he
comes, unseen, with the leaves crackling
under his feet, and suddenly emerges,
sometimes at a walk, sometimes at full
gallop, sometimes with an angry roar’.
78
The modern game known to Americans
as ‘football’ in fact evolved from the
same common British ancestor as both
soccer and rugby. For a time it seemed
likely that the American colleges would
adopt the English Football Association’s
rules, but in the 1870s they agreed on a
hybrid game and by the 1880s had
adopted rules (forward passes, tackling
of the ball) quite distinct from and
incompatible with those of either soccer
or rugby.
79
The refrain of Henry Newbolt’s ‘Vitaï
Lampada’ (1897), the classic depiction
of school cricket as a form of military
apprenticeship. Newbolt was a product
of Clifton.
80
A Lowland Scot was fractionally
superior to an Englishman. Ancient
Athenians came out on top.
81
He was offered, accepted but then
resigned after just three days the Private
Secretaryship to Lord Ripon, on the
latter’s appointment as Viceroy of India.
The sticking point was a letter he was
asked to write in response to an address
to the Viceroy, to the effect that the
Viceroy had read it with interest. ‘You
know perfectly’, he declared, ‘that Lord
Ripon has never read it, and I can’t say
that sort of thing’. He had an obsessive
aversion to dinner parties, which would
have been a serious handicap in a
Viceroy’s Private Secretary.
82
By the end of the war, Canada, Australia
and New Zealand did indeed supply
30,000 troops.
83
30,000 was an underestimate. According
to the Boers’ figures, 54,667 men took
up arms, but by 1903 the British were
claiming a total of 72,975.
84
It should be noted that around two-thirds
of British mortality was due to typhoid,
dysentery and other diseases, not enemy
action.
85
Sir Nevile Henderson, the British
ambassador in Berlin in the 1930s,
recalled that when he remonstrated with
Goering about the brutality of the Nazi
concentration camps, the latter took
down from his shelves a volume of a
German encyclopaedia: ‘Opening it at
Konzentrationslager ... he read out:
“First used by the British in the South
African War”’.
86
The effects of the legislation were
bitterly described by Solomon Plaatje in
his Native Life in South Africa (1916).
87
Improvements were much slower in
coming to the black camps. Significantly,
the peak of mortality there – 38 per cent
– was in December 1902.
88
Nineteenth-century bond prices were
quoted in percentages of their nominal
value. These loans were Turkish bonds
secured on the ‘tribute’ paid annually by
Egypt to Turkey.
89
The German aim, it should be noted, was
partly defensive, and far from irrational
given Britain’s projected use of a naval
blockade in the event of a war with
Germany.
90
At one point he talked grandly of a ‘New
Triple Alliance between the Teutonic
race and the two great branches of the
Anglo-Saxon race’.
91
To be precise, the German battlefleet
was two-thirds the size of the British.
92
The promenade at Ostend and the golf
course at nearby Klemskerke are just
two of the fruits of Leopold II’s regime
there.
93
The Germans acted more out of a sense
of weakness than strength. The Chief of
the Great General Staff, Helmuth von
Moltke, told the State Secretary at the
Foreign Office Gottlieb von Jagow in
May 1914: ‘We must wage a preventive
war to conquer our opponents as long as
we still have a reasonable chance in this
struggle.’ Note the doleful phrase ‘a
reasonable chance’. But Moltke was
convinced ‘that we would never again
find a situation as favourable as now,
when neither France nor Russia had
completed the extension of their army
organizations’.
94
At the start of the war Buchan was a war
correspondent before joining the army.
He served on the Headquarters Staff of
the British Army in France as temporary
Lieutenant-Colonel and when Lloyd
George became Prime Minister was
appointed Director of Information (1917
– 18). He was briefly Director of
Intelligence, but had informal access to
intelligence information throughout the
war.
95
Though there was already a railway
connection between Berlin and
Constantinople (via Vienna), the Sultan’s
aim was to extend the line across
Anatolia via Ankara to Baghdad. The
German bankers only really wanted to
build the line to Ankara but in 1899
were forced into going on to Baghdad by
the Kaiser. They then sought to make the
line profitable by extending it to Basra.
There had been considerable British
suspicion of the project, but it cannot be
regarded as a cause of the war. In fact a
deal had been struck on the very eve of
the war giving the Germans the right to
extend the line to Basra in return for
letting the British lead the exploitation of
the Mesopotamian oilfields.
96
One of the most successful actions at the
Somme was the Secunderabad Brigade’s
attack at Morlancourt.
97
The Australian Frederic Manning’s
semi-autobiographical novel Middle
Parts of Fortune captured the equally
disgusted mood among ordinary English
soldiers at the Somme.
98
In fact he was back in government (as
Minister of Supply) just two years later.
99
The subsequent neglect and high
mortality of Townshend’s force was a
scandal which led to the resignation of
Austen Chamberlain as Secretary of
State for India, though the fault lay with
his subordinates’ misguided parsimony.
100
He is supposed to have said, on being
handed the keys to the city: ‘I don’t want
yer city. I want some heggs for my
hofficers!’
101
Under the wartime Sykes-Picot
agreement, which Lawrence furiously
disavowed. He told Faysal he ‘intended
to stick to them through thick and thin if
necessary to fight against the French for
the recovery of Syria’.
102
Total UK foreign capital stocks in 1930
amounted to $18.2 billion; the figure for
the US was $14.7 billion.
103
In 1926 the Balfour Report on Imperial
Relations had proposed redefining the
dominions as ‘autonomous communities
within the British Empire, equal in status
and in no way subordinate to one another
in any aspect of their domestic or
external affairs ... [and] united by a
common allegiance to the crown’, and
this wording was adopted in the 1931
Statute of Westminster. The dominions
were still barred from passing
legislation contrary to Westminster, but
now Westminster could only legislate for
the dominions at their request and the
dominions were free to withdraw if they
wished from what was now rechristened
the ‘British Commonwealth of Nations’.
Interestingly, there was little enthusiasm
for this decentralization in either
Australia or New Zealand, which did
not adopt the statute until the 1940s.
104
Chamberlain never shared his father’s
passion for the Empire, perhaps because
as a young man he had been forced by
his father to run a 20,000 acre sisal
estate in the Bahamas. The venture was a
total failure.
105
Gandhi served as a stretcher-bearer at
Spion Kop.
106
The episode is alluded to in Forster’s A
Passage to India: ‘Why, they ought to
crawl from here to the caves on their
hands and knees whenever an English-
woman’s in sight ... they ought to be
ground into the dust ...’
107
On 9 August, just before the Germans
launched their offensive against Britain’s
air defences, the RAF had 1,032
fighters. The German fighters available
for the attack numbered 1,011.
Moreover, the RAF had 1,400 pilots,
several hundred more than the Luftwaffe.
And crucially, Britain out-produced
Germany: during the crucial months from
June until September 1940, 1,900 new
fighters were churned out by British
factories, compared with just 775 in
Germany. The technical advantage of
radar and a superb system of command
and control also greatly enhanced British
effectiveness. Overall, German losses
(including bombers) were nearly double
British (1,733 to 915).
108
The term ‘British Commonwealth of
Nations’ was first used in the Anglo-
Irish Treaty of 1922 to convey the near
autonomy of the dominions.
109
In a speech in Tokyo in 1944 Bose
explicitly called for an Indian state ‘of
an authoritarian character’. By this time
he was calling himself the Netaji (dear
leader) and affecting the usual fascist
uniform.
110
He was the son of Lord Parmoor and the
husband of the heiress to the Eno’s Fruit
Salts fortune.
111
William Ferguson Massey, New Zealand
Prime Minister from 1912 to 1925.
112
His mother was Brooklyn-born Jennie
Jerome, daughter of Leonard Jerome,
proprietor of the New York Times.
113
General Smuts replied in an interview
for Life the following December that the
Commonwealth was ‘the widest system
of organized human freedom which has
ever existed in human history’.
114
Nor, significantly, did Roosevelt seem to
intend that trusteeship should be the
future basis of Russia’s vast Eurasian
empire. This was what British officials
dubbed the ‘salt water fallacy’:
somehow colonies were treated
differently if they were separated from
those who ruled them by sea.
115
As he told a friend in 1941: ‘I always
regard a visit [to the US] as in the nature
of a serious illness to be followed by
convalescence’.
116
To be precise, Lord Louis Francis
Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten,
‘KG, PC, GCB, OM, GCSI, GCIE,
GCVO, DSO, FRS, Hon. DCL, Hon.
LLD, Hon. D.Sc., AMIEE, AMRINI’ –
as he liked to remind people.
Mountbatten liked to construct
genealogical tables plotting his family’s
royal lineage, using a system designed
for pedigree cattle breeders.
117
The Muslim League had been founded as
early as 1906 but, under the leadership
of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, it became
committed to the idea of a separate
Muslim state only in 1940.
118
Both the Jewish state and Arab
nationalism were in some measure
creations of British policy during the
First World War; but the terms of the
1917 Balfour Declaration had turned out
to contain a hopeless contradiction: ‘His
Majesty’s Government view with favour
the establishment in Palestine of a
national home for the Jewish people, and
will use their best endeavours to
facilitate the achievement of this object,
it being clearly understood that nothing
shall be done which may prejudice the
civil and religious rights of existing non-
Jewish communities in Palestine ...’
119
The last installment is due to be repaid
in 2006.
First published in 2002 by Allen Lane, an imprint of
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London wc2r 0rl,
England