CHRISTOPHER DUGGAN IMPERIALISM AND EMPIRE

CHRISTOPHER DUGGAN IMPERIALISM AND EMPIRE

At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the world was dominated by the British Empire. Based on military and aristocratic values, and an autocratic political system, this empire was run through the application of ideas about trade and government that had been inherited on the one hand from seventeenth-century European mercantilism, and on the other from indigenous non-European political, social and economic institutions. It was only as political and economic change proceeded in Britain during the 1830s that contemporaries began to apply new ideas to the running of empire, bringing a commitment to humanitarianism, education, free trade and responsible self-government. This did not lead to an overnight revolution in colonial policy, however, or to the emergence of a coherent ideology of imperial rule. Outside the empire of white settlement, the implementation of new ideas was often delayed and limited. Indeed, it was only the resurgence of old imperial rivalries and the emergence of new ones in the last

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decades of the nineteenth century that forced British thinkers to systematically consider how to run an empire. As new colonial possessions in Africa and Asia were drawn into European, US and Japanese empires, thinkers around the world began to consider why there was a need to stake out territorial claims and control colonial resources. The ‘new imperialism’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries thus brought new ways of thinking about empire, but also contained echoes of the aggressive and interventionist thinking of the early nineteenth century.

In discussing nineteenth-century thinking about empire, it is important to note that the word ‘imperialism’ was not used to describe European overseas expansion until the later decades of the century. Moreover, for most of the period contemporaries tended to do little abstract thinking about empire. J.R.Seeley’s claim that the British Empire was acquired in ‘a fit of absence of mind’ ignored the ruthless determination with which many policy-makers, colonial administrators and opportunistic ‘men on the spot’ went about expanding and consolidating imperial frontiers. It did however accurately describe the relative absence of serious discussion of the nature and purpose of overseas expansion that was a feature of most of the period. The history of nineteenth-century thought about empire is largely the history of pragmatic and businesslike discussion of the everyday realities of colonial trade and administration.

The early nineteenth-century British Empire was a by-product of the expansion of the English fiscal-military state, a process that reached its apogee during the Napoleonic Wars. The creation of government structures capable of raising large amounts of money through taxes and loans, and able to spend the vast bulk of that revenue on the army and navy, buttressed an aristocratic and aggressively expansionist order. The consolidation of

a ‘British’ state with the power to rule the distinct societies of the UK was accompanied by the acquisition of new colonies in Southern Africa, Australia, India and the Far East. This ‘second British Empire’ provided compensation for the Thirteen Colonies lost during the American Revolution. Although important colonial possessions remained in British North America and the Caribbean, the empire’s centre of gravity shifted eastwards.

However, although the construction of this empire was accompanied by pragmatic new administrative and commercial arrangements in many areas, few contemporaries were encouraged to think about colonial rule in drastically innovate ways. In the sphere of political economy, mercantilist ideas, first codified in the seventeenth century, continued to dominate. According to this school of thought, trade between colony and mother country had to be closely regulated in order to ensure that Britain benefited. An ‘old colonial system’ had been constructed accordingly, with a whole host of laws, regulations and protective tariffs designed to control trade. During the Napoleonic Wars, measures like the Navigation Acts, designed to encourage the development of a strong merchant navy, were supplemented by the introduction of timber and sugar duties in order to encourage the production of key raw materials in British North America and the West Indies.

Ideas about colonial rule also drew on what were seen to be traditional, even age-old precepts. British policy-makers and administrators justified the authoritarianism of British rule in India and the Far East in terms of the concept of ‘oriental despotism’, the idea that indigenous peoples were used to being governed by arbitrary states and had to

be treated accordingly. Officials of the ruling East India Company also sought to harness

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other aspects of perceived Indian tradition, seeking through the ryotwari or ‘peasant- wise’ system to create a more settled system of commercial agriculture amenable to taxation. Old village councils or panchayat were also revived as a means of reinforcing local communities dominated by landed wealth. How far such thinking led to the preservation of genuinely traditional societies, and how far it in reality pushed indigenous peoples into new moulds that proved useful for the colonial state, is still a matter for debate.

In temperate zones, British outposts of empire meanwhile generally took the form of colonies of settlement, enclaves of European migrant agriculture and trade. Here, as in the tropical colonies, trade policy was still shaped by mercantilism, while political institutions continued to reflect older ways of thinking about colonial representation and rule. Only in the penal colonies of Australia were societies created along new, innovative lines, as contemporaries attempted to put into practice (albeit with limited success) the strictures for rational punishment laid down by JEREMY BENTHAM.

The ideological underpinnings of this early nineteenth-century, mercantilist, autocratic British Empire were never immune from assault. Central to imperial thinking in this period was the idea that the British constituted a ‘governing race’, with a right and a duty to spread their ideals and institutions to others, a view expressed in documents such as the Report of the Select Committee on Aborigines (1837). Patriotic and racial beliefs merged, and were fed by growing Anglican and Nonconformist missionary activity. However, such ideas were also tempered by the concept of trusteeship, developed during the 1780s by EDMUND BURKE. According to Burke, Europeans only held power over indigenous peoples in trust, until the governed were able to govern themselves. Colonial administration thus had to take the welfare and development of the indigenous subject as its first priority, preparing colonial populations for eventual self-government through British parliamentary institutions.

Such arguments provided ideological under-pinnings for the claims of some British thinkers that colonial policy should aim to promote ‘civilization’, extending British political structures to colonial government. This thinking also reflected the influence of the ‘stadial’ view of history advocated by Scottish Enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Smith. This model, based on the idea that societies progressed towards modernity through

a number of intermediate stages, was taken by some as applicable to the future development of indigenous societies, which seemed to be at stages analogous to those experienced previously by Western countries. If this was true, then colonial subjects could also progress towards ‘civilization’, and be encouraged to move in the right direction. Men like THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY thus argued that indigenous peoples should be educated along Western lines, preparing them for a time when they would run British-derived institutions for themselves. The colonial state would in the mean time stamp out indigenous customs abhorrent to Western eyes, including Indian practices such as suttee (widow burning) and female infanticide.

These changing attitudes towards colonial rule over indigenous peoples in turn reflected a broader transformation in the nature of political discourse in Britain. Particularly important was the campaign that led to the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, delivering a crushing blow against the idea that the state should privilege particular economic interest groups through legislation. Even before repeal, William Huskisson and Robert Peel had begun to dismantle the protectionist structure, and in 1849 the

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Navigation Acts were finally eliminated. The fate of mercantilism was effectively sealed as Britain moved towards a more regimented system of bureaucratic government that intervened less in daily life, but when it did intervene, was more efficient in so doing.

During the mid-nineteenth century, mercantilism gave way to a new form of free-trade imperialism based on the belief that a dynamic British manufacturing economy could naturally secure British international political hegemony. Peripheral areas of the world could be nudged into a British-dominated global trading system either through gentle pressure, for example the free-trade treaties signed with many Latin America governments, or through the deployment of limited but decisive force such as the ‘gunboat diplomacy’ used to open China up to international trade. Elsewhere Britain would annex key enclaves, including Singapore, to form the focuses of expanding regional trade networks. This policy was perhaps most closely associated with the British foreign secretary and prime minister, Lord Palmerston, who in his speeches set out a policy of opening up international trade through minimal government intervention on the one hand and the constant threat of force on the other.

Ideas about the role of the colonies of settlement also began to change in this period of free-trade imperialism. This was in part due to the influence of a loosely connected group of ‘colonial reformers’, of whom the most prominent, even notorious, was Edward Gibbon Wakefield. While serving a sentence in Newgate Prison for abducting and attempting to marry an underage heiress, Wakefield developed an interest in Britain’s over-seas empire. In 1829 he published A Letter from Sydney, which purported to be written by an Australian colonist, and which advocated a policy of ‘systematic colonization’. Wakefield argued that a simple complementarity existed between the economic and social needs of the mother country and the settler colonies. Migration from an over-crowded Britain to the wide open spaces of the colonies would end the physical and moral degradation of the working classes in British urban slums and create prosperous new settler societies on the labour-starved periphery. These colonies would in turn supply raw materials and consume British manufactured goods, helping to raise the living standard of those left in Britain’s cities. This idea of a complementarity of interest between colony and mother country would resurface in various guises over the decades that followed, and exert a powerful influence over generations of thinking about the relationship between Britain and the colonies of settlement.

Wakefield also argued that British governments should not allow emigration to continue on its existing haphazard basis. Neither should the government simply ‘shovel out paupers’ by sending the degenerate underclass to the colonies, a policy which would recreate British social problems abroad. Instead, Wakefield envisaged the state-supported export of the entire British social hierarchy. The migration of peasants, workers, bourgeoisie and landed gentry in correct proportion would supposedly allow the replication of British values in the colonies of settlement. Wakefield’s vision represented the optimism of contemporary colonial reformers who dreamed about the potentially transformative powers of the modern state.

Wakefield and his followers had some impact on British colonial policy, particularly in the new colonies founded in South Australia and New Zealand. It is possible to exaggerate the extent of his influence however. For the Colonial Office was unwilling to undertake the programmes of large-scale state intervention envisaged by the colonial reformers. Instead, by the mid-nineteenth century, it was increasingly leaving the

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administration of the settler colonies to local parliamentary institutions and political elites. This reflected the export to the colonies of new British ideas about government.

While apparent for many years, the difficulties of managing diverse local populations in the colonies of settlement, and the inadequacies of existing political arrangements, were made particularly obvious by the rebellions that took place in Upper and Lower Canada in 1837. The British government responded by sending a new governor general, Lord Durham. On his return Durham published a report on conditions in the Canadas, including suggestions for reform that bore the imprint of Wakefield’s thinking. While later generations came to see the report as setting the colonies of settlement on the path to ‘responsible self-government’ and ultimate independence, revisionist studies in the 1970s demonstrated that the impact of the Durham report was in reality limited. Much more important were practical shifts that occurred in the nature of government in Britain, particularly the final ascendancy of Parliament over the Crown that was guaranteed in 1841, when the government of Lord Melbourne was forced out of power by the Commons, even though it enjoyed Queen Victoria’s continued support. It was necessary to hammer out the basis of responsible government in Britain before it could be extended to the colonies of settlement.

Outside the colonies of settlement humanitarianism also brought new ways of thinking about empire, building on the Burkean heritage. This was perhaps most clearly expressed in the anti-slavery movement. Since the later eighteenth century, genuine moral outrage at the maintenance of slavery in an empire that prided itself (however hypocritically) on British liberties had been reinforced by growing Anglican and Nonconformist evangelical opposition to human bondage. Humanitarian opposition helped bring about the end of the slave trade in the British Empire in 1807, and in 1823 the Anti-Slavery Society was established in London to press for the emancipation of those who remained enslaved. Growing pressure from Caribbean slaves themselves, and a number of slave rebellions, strengthened this movement, and emancipation finally came at midnight on 31 July 1834 (although compulsory apprenticeship for freed slaves continued until 1838).

Humanitarianism subsequently suffered a severe blow however in the form of the 1857 Indian Mutiny and Rebellion. The violence and scale of the rising seriously damaged confidence in the ability of British institutions to create ‘civilized’ Western societies in the colonies. The point was rammed home by other instances of indigenous resistance to British rule, such as the New Zealand Wars. As a result, contemporaries became increasingly pessimistic about the capacities of indigenous peoples for reform, and more conservative in their proposals for change. Many came to argue that the transformation of indigenous societies could be but a slow, gradual process. In the mean time, it was claimed, traditional political, social and economic structures had to be maintained. Burke’s concept of trusteeship began to be interpreted in terms of a passive duty to prevent interference with native traditions and customs, rather than as a mandate to ‘civilize’ indigenous peoples.

These changes also widened the perceived gap between the two different types of colony, temperate-zone white settler colonies and tropical colonies populated predominantly by indigenous peoples or non-European migrants. While attitudes towards the socalled tropical dependencies became more pessimistic, the rapid economic growth of the colonies of settlement in the second half of the nineteenth century, secured through massive inputs of human and financial capital from Britain, encouraged contemporaries

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to start thinking in new ways about what came to be known from the late 1860s as the ‘Dominions’ of white settlement.

This departure corresponded with a period in which Britain’s mid-Victorian international commercial lead began to disappear. As relative decline set in, contemporaries began to look at the world around them in a new light. In Britain, Halford Mackinder of the London School of Economics argued that international rivalries had to

be examined through the lens of geopolitics. Mackinder believed that in the future large, effectively organized states would dominate. The late nineteenth century had seen the unification of Italy, Germany, Russia and the USA into powerful new states controlling substantial military and economic resources. These new continental empires threatened to overwhelm island nations. In geopolitical terms, a maritime power like Britain could only find a solution to this predicament by turning to the people of the settler colonies. Here, early inspiration was provided by Sir Charles W.Dilke’s Greater Britain, published in 1868, which stressed the potential of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ community created by the settler diaspora of the previous decades. Such ideas did not really take off until the 1880s, however, when they were popularized by a series of lectures delivered at Cambridge University in 1883 (subsequently published as The Expansion of England) by Sir J.R.Seeley. Seeley argued that Britain and the Dominions could only meet future challenges if unified under the umbrella of a single state, and bound together by a single imperial identity.

The need to recruit the human and material resources of the Dominions into a more unified imperial structure led some to suggest reform of the existing constitutional basis of empire. From 1884 the Imperial Federation League agitated for parliamentary reforms that would give the Dominions some form of representation at West-minster. Although imperial federation was rejected by Gladstone’s government in 1893, debate continued, feeding into controversy over Irish Home Rule and resurrected during the early twentieth century by Lionel Curtis’s Round Table movement.

However, not all those who wished to recruit the resources of the Dominions agreed that the best way to do so was through constitutional reform. ‘Constructive imperialists’ instead argued that policies designed to promote the emergence and consolidation of complementary economies in Britain and the Dominions were necessary before any constitutional realignment could be contemplated. This movement corresponded with the resurgence of protectionist thought in Britain, partly in response to the imposition of tariffs in the USA and some European countries as a result of the collapse of agricultural prices during the Great Depression of 1873–95. In 1903, Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain launched his Tariff Reform campaign, which sought to bring the Dominions to the aid of the British ‘weary Titan’ through a system of imperial tariff preferences.

For Tariff Reformers, political or constitutional unity could only work if it came naturally, as the product of economic integration. This in turn reflected a new way of thinking about the nature of the communities that had emerged in the Dominions, enshrined in the writings of the British imperial theorist Richard Jebb. In Studies in Colonial Nationalism (1905), Jebb argued that national identities were emerging in the Dominions, and that imperial policy had to be carefully adjusted to take this into account. Dominion nationalism could be harnessed to imperial unity, but only if British policy- makers accepted that the empire would have to become an alliance of equal nations. Such views were reiterated by Sir C.P.Lucas, the Assistant Under-secretary of State for the

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Colonies, in Greater Rome and Greater Britain (1912). Lucas highlighted the importance of the Crown as the key link between Britain and the self-governing Dominions, a theme that would remain important throughout the twentieth century.

Lucas also recognized that, in the tropical dependencies, the link with Britain rested less on sentiment and more on force. To some extent, this reflected the novelty of colonial rule in many areas of Africa and Asia, which had only become colonies during the 1880s and 1890s under the pressure of heightened imperial competition. Prior to this period, limited colonial expansion for pragmatic purposes had seemed to contemporaries to require little in the way of ideological justification. French imperial expansion in Cochin China and North Africa, often accomplished by maverick military leaders in defiance of civil authorities in Paris, was supported by only flimsy ideological underpinnings that went little further than vague claims about la mission civilisatrice. In the Congo, annexed by the Belgian King Leopold II in 1884, similar claims failed to conceal gross exploitation. While Leopold’s colonial state launched expeditions to punish those Africans who failed to provide sufficient labour or commodities, European concessionaires were allowed to operate unchecked. Unreconstructed mercantilism meanwhile survived in the Dutch East Indies, in the guise of the ‘cultivation system’. Colonies were obliged to devote one-fifth of their land to the production of export commodities, which were given to the Dutch government in return for a nominal fee. This fee was then paid back to the government in the form of taxation.

However, the Scramble for Africa and other late nineteenth-century outbursts of imperial rivalry did help modify contemporary thinking about empire. Particularly important in this regard was the wider spread of SOCIAL DARWINISM, over-turning the free-trade belief in an international order based on peaceful co-operation. Social Darwinism posited a world of cut-throat competition for national survival, in which the acquisition of colonies became a means of demonstrating the virility and fitness of a nation, and also of providing the resources and opportunities needed to participate in the struggle.

By the later decades of the nineteenth century, this new way of thinking about the role of colonies in sustaining the mother country had begun to take hold in some of the older imperial powers. In Britain, interest in tropical conquest as a means to promote national greatness was perhaps most closely linked with Prime Minister BENJAMIN DISRAELI. In France, the Comité de l’Afrique Française began to discuss the integration of French possessions in Africa into an efficient and powerful whole. It was in the case of the newcomer imperial powers that such thinking was most important however. The imperial enthusiasms of German pressure groups such as the Kolonialverein (founded in 1882) and the Gesellschaft f r Deutsche Kolonisation (founded in 1884—the two subsequently merged to form the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft in 1887) were stoked by a sense of Torschlusspanik, or fear that the door of colonial opportunity might soon be closed, denying Germany great-power status. Similarly, in a rapidly changing Japan, Social Darwinist ideas were imported along with other Western ideas about state and society. For thinkers like Tokutomi Soho, Japanese imperial expansion into Korea and China was

a means to assert equality with the Western powers. For others, imperialism would help bring domestic social unity, deemed vital if Japan was to replicate Western industrial expansion. Even in the USA, Social Darwinism helped encourage Americans to take up

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‘the white man’s burden’, turning the ideas of Manifest Destiny developed during westwards expansion into justification for the conquest of the Philippines,

As the carve-up of Africa and Asia proceeded apace, contemporaries began to grapple with the question of what to do with these newly acquired tropical colonies. In general, the response was to attempt to encourage the production of commodities for export markets. In German Southwest Africa, this was pursued through policies designed to rapidly develop a settler, pastoral economy, involving the near eradication of the indigenous Herero peoples. In other German colonies, attempts to encourage the production of food and raw materials took the less malevolent form of the application of advances in scientific understanding to colonial health and agriculture through the foundation of institutions designed to eradicate human, animal and plant diseases, and encourage the adoption of more efficient agricultural practices. Similar tendencies could

be observed in the Dutch empire, where an ‘ethical’ policy of improvement in education, administration, public health and agriculture was adopted in 1901. Similar programmes were introduced by US and French governments, who also sought to tie colonial economies more closely to the metropole through tariff preferences. In Britain, Joseph Chamberlain and his successors at the Colonial Office pushed through economic and administrative reforms, but proved unable to overcome laissez-faire principles and introduce a system of tariff preference. It would not be until after the First World War that contemporaries would begin to think about the development of the tropics in earnest.