The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (26 page)

Three separate developments may have strengthened this view. The first (and perhaps the most important) was the effect of railway construction. Railways connected large British interests to settler expansion. Railway-building offered much more definite proof that the colonies could achieve dense and continuous settlement, replicating the pattern of British society at home, and sustaining a similar level of institutions and culture. Above all, perhaps, investment in railways created loud vested interests with an obvious motive in selling the colonies’ future to British opinion.
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The second development was the growing belief from mid-century onwards that industrialisation in Britain had imposed high social costs some of which could be redeemed in the colonies. This was the idea that colonial life, free from the contagion of urban industrialism, offered a physically and morally healthier climate. Here British social virtues could be preserved and revived; the perils of decadence, degeneration and ‘Caesarism’ – a populist dictatorship – averted.
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This perception coincided with the steady advance of emigration (and return migration) to become key social features not just of the Celtic ‘periphery’ but of English society as well. Thirdly, with the rising sense of a world that was linked by fast and regular movement – by wire, steamship and rail – the settlement colonies came to look less like the random results of demographic opportunism and more like the links in an imperial ‘chain’, part of a system of global power. The message of John Robert Seeley's
Expansion of England
(1883), that the settlement colonies should be seen as an organic extension of Britain not part of the burdensome empire of rule, was the cogent expression of an emerging idea, not a sudden new insight.
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The late Victorians experienced an enlargement of their mental horizons, and also perhaps in their sense of identity.

In late-Victorian Britain, this shift of attitudes was part of a new imperial outlook. It was matched by a change in the colonies of white settlement, soon to be called the ‘white dominions’. There too the imperial idea was transformed and made popular. Yet, by the latter part of the century, in all the settlement colonies, there was a growing sense of self-conscious nationhood and (especially after 1900) a buoyant view of their economic future as ‘young nations’. This paradox was resolved by the special quality of settler nationalism. In Canada, Australia, New Zealand and (as we shall see) among the British minority in South Africa, national identity was asserted by rejecting subservience to the British
government
, but by affirming equality with Britain as ‘British peoples’ or ‘nations’. It was this ‘Britannic nationalism’ which underpinned the commitment of all the white dominions to the imperial enterprise, and the British world-system, until its eventual disintegration in the 1940s and 1950s. It was not an unthinking observance of old imperial loyalty, nor an unconsummated passion for an impractical imperial federation. It was stronger, subtler and deeply rooted in the needs of the dominions themselves. Socially, it derived from the feeling that creating modern large-scale societies demanded institutions and habits – private and public – on the model already familiar in Britain, the great exemplar of a ‘modern’ community, but improved and adapted to local requirements. Politically it sprang up when two great imperatives converged in the later nineteenth century: the urge for expansion and need for cohesion. Expansion in an age of rival empires and ‘world-states’ could only be secure under the aegis of British power, and so long as the imperial centre acknowledged the claims of its Britannic outposts. So Britannic nationalism meant asserting settler influence at the heart of the empire. Secondly, as settler society grew more urban and industrial, more divided by wealth and class, more conscious of deficiencies of education and welfare, Britannic ethnicity offered the promise of social cohesion, and a charter for social renewal. A reformed and purified local Britishness went hand in hand with – was the domestic counterpart to – a grander role as ‘British nations’, partners, not subjects, of imperial Britain.

Canada

The oldest self-governing settler societies in the British Empire were in British North America. They were also the first to federate – as the Dominion of Canada in 1867. With the acquisition of Rupertsland – the vast northern domain of the Hudson's Bay Company – in 1869, adhesion of British Columbia (in 1871) and Prince Edward Island (in 1873), Canada became a transcontinental state rivalling in territorial scale the great republic to the south. But in wealth and population it was puny. There was the rub. A
second
transcontinental state in North America flew in the face of commercial and geographical logic. Along its whole length, the new dominion was bound to feel the immense gravitational pull of American enterprise. The builders of confederation embarked upon a staggeringly grandiose venture for a small colonial community, deeply divided by ethnicity, region and religion, and already strung out along a ribbon of cultivation between Lake Huron and Halifax. Measured by ambition, the ‘Fathers of Confederation’ (principally John A. Macdonald and George Brown) were among the greatest of Victorian empire-builders, planning a vast new colony anchored by ‘British connection’,
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loyal to the British Crown and drawing on British migrants and capital to fuel its expansion. They looked forward to the day, declared George Brown in the confederation debates in 1865, ‘when one united government under the British flag shall extend from shore to shore’.
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From the beginning, the politics of the new dominion were dominated by two interlocking priorities. The first was to make the new federal constitution workable. That meant reconciling the Maritime provinces to the burden of debt that the old Canadian provinces (now Ontario and Quebec) had accumulated building railways and canals, and to the tariff that had been imposed to pay for them. It meant the careful management of Quebec with its French Canadian majority and its vocal minority of English Canadians in Montreal and the ‘Eastern Townships’. Federation had separated the two Canadian provinces previously locked in legislative union, but did little to reduce the mutual antipathy of Protestant Ontario and Catholic Quebec. It meant heading off the opposition among Ontario farmers to the railway and banking interests from whose headquarters in St James Street, Montreal, the first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, was widely believed to take his orders and his party funds. It meant an uphill struggle to broaden the power and authority of the new ‘general government’ in Ottawa against provincial pressure for devolution or even (in the case of Nova Scotia) for secession.

These teething problems were constantly entangled with the second great issue that absorbed both Macdonald and his Reform (or ‘Grit’, later Liberal) opponents: how to make good the dominion's claim to the vast western empire beyond the Great Lakes, the key to its future as a separate ‘British’ North American state. The imperial government in London had been eager to transfer ‘Rupertsland’ to Canada, believing that the Hudson's Bay Company could no longer rule a vast inland colony now thought ripe for agricultural development. But the conveyance was not as easy as it seemed. For one thing, the best organised community in the west, the mixed-race (French and Indian)
Metis
in the Red River Valley (near modern Winnipeg), objected to a transfer that they feared would bring a flood of British settlers from Ontario.
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Under the charismatic leadership of Louis Riel, they staged the first of two northwestern rebellions whose suppression required the despatch of imperial troops under Sir Garnet Wolseley, the ubiquitous generalissimo of the Empire's smaller wars. The
Metis
were routed and the new province of Manitoba set up.
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But, as Macdonald well knew, a much greater challenge awaited. Only with a railway across the continent could he hope to transform the northwestern interior from an economic desert into a great agrarian asset – and Canada from a stagnant eastern colony into a dynamic continental state.

In the first decade of confederation, there was little to show for the high hopes of 1867. Macdonald's first attempt to commission a railway across the continent was a failure, and the ensuing ‘Pacific scandal’ blew him out of office in 1873. His Reform party opponents, suspicious of the Montreal capitalists, and hobbled by economic depression, made no headway. Canada was in the doldrums. The immigrants it did attract were as likely to pass on to the United States as to stay; many more Canadians moved south of the border in search of better times: nearly one million between 1881 and 1891.
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Macdonald came back to office in 1878. In the thirteen years that followed, he fashioned a surprisingly durable political regime, presided over the completion of the east–west railway and pushed through Canada's transformation into a separate northern economy with a tariff wall to guard its railways, trade, finance and infant industry. Together, the ‘Macdonaldian state’, the Canadian Pacific Railway and the ‘national policy’ turned the prospectus of confederation into something like reality. The question was whether the ‘Canada’ that Macdonald had made could survive the disappearance of his master touch.

By the time of his death in 1891, Macdonald had been the dominant figure in Canadian politics for fifty years. In the black arts of patronage, ‘Old Tomorrow’ was a virtuoso, reconciling Canada's complex dualities – English and French, monarchy and populism, liberal and clerical, protestant and catholic, provincial and federal – by the systematic use of every office under federal control in a spoils system for party purposes.
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Perhaps instinctively, he grasped the irreducible conditions of Canadian unity. British institutions and a shared allegiance to the British Crown formed the only ideological glue between the regions and peoples that made up the federation. The mercantile and financial nexus at Montreal was the natural (indeed only) focus of a ‘northern economy’. The transcontinental hinterland, and a railway to serve it, offered the only escape from the economic failure and encirclement that threatened Eastern Canada. Macdonald's ‘national policy’ had fused these into a rough and ready programme and a loyal political following. Together, they were robust enough to overcome the challenge of ‘reciprocity’ in 1891 – the call for commercial union with the United States championed by the Liberal opposition. ‘The old flag, the old policy and the old leader’ (Macdonald's slogan in 1891) fended off the critics of the ‘northern economy’, despite deepening depression and the lack of any sign that the west would relieve it. But, by the mid-1890s, the political system that had been built round Macdonald's personal ascendancy was on the brink of collapse. The provinces were in revolt and determined to win back from the centre some of the rights and revenues conceded in 1867. More ominously still, the coalition that Macdonald had forged between Montreal business, the protestant and loyalist tradition in Ontario and the clerical conservatives (the
Bleus
) in Quebec – the electoral basis of Conservative predominance since the 1870s – began to break up. The growth of mass politics in Quebec weakened the elite on whom Macdonald had relied.
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The vitriolic disagreement between Ontario and Quebec politicians over the execution of Louis Riel (convicted of murder after the second northwest rebellion in 1885) and over separate schools for Manitoba Catholics
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widened the breach and exposed Macdonald's successors to criticism from all sides. When the Conservatives were swept away by a new system-builder, the Liberal Wilfrid Laurier, the result was not only a new party regime. To many Canadians, a new definition of the Canadian state and its bond with Britain now seemed necessary.

The challenge had already been posed by the radical historian Goldwin Smith, sometime professor in Oxford, now the resident sage in Toronto. In his widely read
Canada and the Canadian Question
(1891), Smith denounced the dominion as the artificial product of tariffs, (subsidised) railways and political corruption. The ‘primary forces’ in Canadian life, he insisted, were pulling it towards a continental future as part of the United States – a future Smith welcomed as the fulfilment of Anglo-Saxon race unity. Towards French Canada and its claims, he displayed, by contrast, a mixture of contempt and dislike. French Canadians were irredeemably backward. But English Canada alone was too weak to swamp, swallow and digest them. Continental union with the United States, among other benefits, would break the obstacle they posed to social progress.
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Smith's argument may have been extreme, but he evoked many of the prejudices of Protestant, Liberal Ontario against the Macdonald state and Quebec. His book drew a carefully argued riposte from O. A. Howland, a Toronto lawyer from one of the city's leading families.
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The ‘natives of this country’ said Howland, would not accept the extinction of their ‘separate nationality’. The St Lawrence river system gave Canada the means for a separate statehood, but within the Empire – ‘a term which should be transferred from the island of Great Britain to the whole of our modern union of constitutionally governed English nations’.
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‘The free men of the Empire’, he went on, claimed ‘equal Imperial citizenship, whether our homes are in Great Britain, or Canada or Australia.’
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As part of the Empire, Howland insisted, Canada would enjoy greater freedom and security than the United States could offer. It would keep its own constitution and escape the crushing embrace of Chicago and New York. And, within fifty years, the Empire would ‘comprise not less than three mighty states…more than equal in population and resources to the United States [in 1860]…What Armageddon of history would threaten the integrity of that vast alliance?’
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