The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (52 page)

In East Africa, the onset of colonial rule had been even more abrupt. There were no old enclaves of European rule on the coast. The interior had been a dangerous region, ravaged by the Arab slave trade and endemic warlordism. Once partition began, the British annexed Uganda in 1894 as the white hope of East African trade and a strategic wedge against French advance across the continent.
¹²³
Uganda could be ruled in alliance with Buganda, largest and strongest of the Great Lakes kingdoms.
¹²⁴
But the East African Protectorate (‘Kenya’ from 1920) was a different story. With no natural rulers, except the Arab sheikhs along the Swahili coast, no revenues, a railway (to Uganda) to maintain and interior populations fiercely resistant to external control, the East African Protectorate was a financial incubus inside an administrative nightmare. The colonial remedy – white farmers to develop the temperate highlands of central Kenya and Indians to help build the railway – had obvious dangers. The settlers were quick to adopt the programme of their brothers to the south: self-government (only for whites); the throwing open of land to white purchase; a white citizen militia (like the Boer commando) for security; and the exclusion of Indians from political life and the ownership of land.
¹²⁵
The settlers extracted the ‘Elgin pledge’ effectively if not formally reserving the Kenya highlands for whites. But they were far too few in number to impose a South African ‘solution’. Well before 1914, East African Indians were mobilising against the threat of settler hegemony.
¹²⁶
African grievances were beginning to be voiced.
¹²⁷
Yet, in this racially segmented society, no group was strong enough to seize control from below. The colonial state was too weak to build its ‘nation’ from above.

In West and East Africa alike, colonial rule had created ‘shallow states’ without roots in local society. Freed from the burden of external defence by partition diplomacy, the British had no need to dig deep. Colonial government became an over-rule concerned mainly to keep the peace between its fractious subjects. The political future of so protean an empire was at best opaque. To many enlightened imperialists (as well as liberal opinion more generally), the greed and brutality of unofficial whites was far more alarming than the political aspirations of (as yet) unorganised blacks. Hence segregation, not integration, seemed the best solution for the medium term. The threat of racial conflict was not ignored by contemporary observers of the imperial system. But they tended to be fatalistic about settler domination and thought African advance would be slow.

Islam

Rather less attention was paid (outside official circles) to the other great fissure that ran through the British world-system. By 1914, the British system depended upon the loyalty and cooperation of a vast array of Muslim rulers and notables: in Zanzibar, Nigeria, Egypt, the Sudan, the Persian Gulf, Princely India and British India, and the Malay States. British relations with the Ottoman Empire and Persia (the largest independent Muslim states) were also exceptionally delicate: both were buffer states whose hostility or collapse would threaten the strategic corridor connecting Britain and India. British attitudes to Islam were contradictory, and there was no tradition of studying the contemporary Islamic world as there was for example in the Netherlands.
¹²⁸
Evangelicals and humanitarians, reared on tales of David Livingstone and the Arab slave trade, were deeply unsympathetic. Romantics were attracted by the ‘timeless’ pre-industrial East and the warrior ethos of desert society. But the most powerful influence on British policy was a wary respect for Islamic ‘fanaticism’: the supposed ability of Muslim rulers or preachers to arouse intense popular feeling against ‘infidel’ imperialists. The Indian Mutiny of 1857, Gordon's fate at Khartoum, and bloody disasters in Afghanistan had ingrained this deeply in the ‘official mind’.

But how dangerous was Islam to the political cohesion of the British system? The Islamic world stretched from Morocco to the Philippines. Islam, remarked the intellectual traveller Gertrude Bell, ‘is the electric current by which the transmission of sentiment is effected, and its potency is increased by the fact that there is little or no sense of territorial nationality to counterbalance it’.
¹²⁹
The government of India harped constantly on the danger of a ‘pan-Islamic’ movement transmitting the grievances of Middle East Muslims to India and beyond. With its chronic anxiety about a second Mutiny, its turbulent borderlands on the Northwest Frontier, and its diplomatic interests in the Persian Gulf, the Indian government's fears were understandable. Its real purpose was to restrain the ‘Gladstonian’ enthusiasm for liberating the Ottoman Sultan's Christian subjects to which opinion at home seemed all too prone. As the ‘great Muhammadan Power’, the Civilians insisted, Britain could not be seen to act against the interests of Islam. But few British observers thought pan-Islamism counted for much. ‘As a factor in British policy’, recalled Ronald Storrs of his time in pre-1914 Egypt, ‘the doctrine of the caliphate – of pan-Islamic theocracy – was mainly the creation of the India Office.’
¹³⁰
It ‘can never become a movement of importance’, judged Arnold Wilson, then a young consul in Southwest Persia.
¹³¹
Lord Cromer was equally sceptical.
¹³²
In a survey of India published shortly before 1914, Bampfylde Fuller, a former Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal (a Muslim majority province), contrasted the political and educational backwardness of Muslims with the progress of Hindus – the real source of any challenge to the Raj.
¹³³

In fact, British opinion, whether sympathetic or not, tended to regard Islam as a culture in decline. It commanded enormous popular piety but had failed intellectually. It was the ‘speculative’ and ‘dogmatic’ nature of Islam, argued Fuller, that made Muslims resistant to modern knowledge. ‘Swathed in the bands of the Koran’, remarked Sir William Muir, the leading academic expert on Islam, ‘the Moslem faith, unlike the Christian, is powerless to adapt itself to varying time and place, keep pace with the march of humanity, direct and purify the social life or elevate mankind.’
¹³⁴
Hence the British assumption that, so long as care was taken not to offend popular religiosity, or the vested interests of the
ulama
, the interpreters of Islamic law, a
modus vivendi
was perfectly possible. British authority should be decently veiled behind Muslim notables: this was the ruling principle of the Cromerian and Lugardian systems. If provocation was avoided, and prestige maintained, there was little danger of Muslim piety turning into nationalist passion.

Whatever its premises, this sanguine view of Anglo-Muslim relations looked plausible enough before 1914. In India, where most of Britain's Muslim subjects could be found, Muslim political attitudes were coloured by the fact of competition with Hindus and fear of Hindu predominance. In Northern Nigeria, the colonial
pax
had helped the emirs against their over-mighty subjects and permitted the extension of Islamic influence over long-resistant ‘pagan’ peoples.
¹³⁵
In Egypt, where the Khedive was usually at odds with the
ulama
of the al-Azhar – the greatest centre of learning in the Muslim world – an independent Egyptian state held little appeal for the doctors of law and theology. Islamic feeling ran athwart the ideas of nationalism and its religious guardians were suspicious of secular rule. Only in extreme conditions, where secular authority was unusually weak or social disruption exceptionally acute, did Islamic politics seem likely to thrive – or pose a real threat to British power.

Ireland and Empire

Ironically, in the last few years before 1914, the main threat to imperial unity lay closest to home – in Ireland. There was nothing new in this. Much the same had been true in the 1590s, the 1640s, the 1680s, the 1770s, 1780s and 1790s, the 1820s and the 1880s. But, after 1900, Home Rule ‘nationalism’ was supposed to have been killed by British ‘kindness’.
¹³⁶
The sale and redistribution of land had been expected to create a contented peasantry, immune to the violent rhetoric of the ‘land war’ that had raged since the 1870s, and shrewdly aware of the economic benefits brought by the Union of Britain and Ireland. Municipal and parliamentary politics, not agrarian terror, would be the political vehicle of this farmer class and its allies among the small-town tradesmen. In this prosaic new world, ‘romantic Ireland’ would be dead and gone, ‘with O’Leary in the grave’.

It failed to happen, at least not on the decisive scale that the architects of ‘kindness’ had hoped for. Part of the reason was the success of the Irish National Party, once led by Charles Stewart Parnell, in entrenching itself over much of Catholic Ireland outside Ulster and the City of Dublin. The Irish party was a formidable machine. When elected local government was extended to Ireland in 1898 in the form of county councils, the party gained a virtual monopoly of the powers and patronage it gave – as Unionist landowners bitterly complained. Its local bosses played a prominent role in the machinery for land sales, the process that was rearing a new breed of wealth in the countryside. The rapid growth of a provincial press gave the party's leaders and their newspaper allies an efficient means of mobilising opinion and exerting pressure. The one thing the party could not do was to force the British government to concede Home Rule. Until 1905, it faced a massive Conservative majority at Westminster. After 1906, as one Anglo-Irish landlord remarked, the scale of the Liberal landslide meant that the new government had no reason to risk introducing a third Home Rule bill.
¹³⁷
After all, Home Rule had twice before been the rock on which Liberal governments had been wrecked.

The Irish party leader, John Redmond, understood this. Redmond was from a Catholic landowning family. His strategy was subtle and perhaps – given the divisions among his followers – deliberately opaque. Raising money in America he spoke of an Irish nation as if complete independence was the plan. But his real aim was to win Ireland the equivalent of dominion autonomy, the same status as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. He liked to compare himself to Louis Botha, who had reconciled Afrikanerdom to self-government under the British Crown. ‘Our stake in the Empire’, he told a Liberal journalist in 1908, ‘is too large for us to be detached from it…[T]he Irish people peopled the waste places of Greater Britain. Our roots are in the Imperial as well as the national.’
¹³⁸
‘Once we receive home rule’, he told the
Daily Express
in 1910, ‘we shall demonstrate our imperial loyalty beyond question.’
¹³⁹
In
The Framework of Home Rule
(1911), Erskine Childers appealed to the Unionist opponents of Home Rule in similar terms. Ireland had nothing to gain by separation (i.e. complete independence), he claimed. ‘Ireland has taken her full share in winning and populating the Empire. The result is hers as much as Britain's.’ Indeed, giving Ireland Home Rule was part of the project of imperial unity, ‘the indispensable preliminary to the close union of all the English-speaking races’.
¹⁴⁰
Redmond hoped to reassure the enemies of Home Rule in both Britain and Ireland, to portray the Irish party as sober and responsible, and to appeal to a sense of All-Irish national identity, Northern and Protestant as well as Southern and Catholic.

In fact, Redmond's analogy between Ireland and South Africa was misplaced and his chances of success were thin. More than half his parliamentary party were ‘agrarians’ for whom the land struggle was still a political talisman. The party's popular movement, the United Irish League, was implicated in harrying landowners into forced sales and in ‘cattle-driving’.
¹⁴¹
A vocal part of his following were ‘cultural’ nationalists, dismayed by the suddenness and intensity with which a Gaelic-speaking and non-literate society had been overwhelmed by anglicisation.
¹⁴²
Limited opportunities for the new Catholic middle class (the comparison with the Bengal
bhadralok
is suggestive) bred fierce impatience with ‘Dublin Castle’, the seat of British rule in Ireland. By 1913, the Gaelic Athletic Association, the seedbed of this revolutionary and culturalist nationalism, had more than 100,000 members.
¹⁴³
When Redmond declared (in October 1910) that he was in favour of a federal solution, making Ireland part of a ‘Federal Empire’, he was forced to retract and repudiate by the pressure of party opinion.
¹⁴⁴
But, if the room for manoeuvre on the nationalist side was limited, the scope for concession by their Unionist opponents seemed even less.

If Ireland had been a thousand miles away, Joseph Chamberlain is supposed to have remarked in 1893,
¹⁴⁵
it would long since have been granted self-government. Inescapable proximity and ineradicable difference were the Irish condition. To British critics of Home Rule, Ireland was too close to be entrusted with self-government: it was part of the Empire's ‘central power’, not an outlying province.
¹⁴⁶
If Irish autonomy was abused, argued Balfour, there would be little that London could do: yet the strategic stakes – if Ireland was disloyal – were much too high for the risk to be taken. The champions of tariff reform and imperial federation, like Milner, saw Home Rule as a retrograde step that would delay not encourage imperial unity. But the greatest obstacle to Redmond's programme (and the real difference from South Africa) lay in the extent to which Ireland's affairs were entangled in the party politics of the British mainland. One symptom of this was the fact that perhaps a quarter of Conservative MPs after 1906 were either Irish Unionists, Southern Irish gentry sitting for mainland constituencies, or married into Southern Unionist families.
¹⁴⁷
The second, and more serious, was the intensity of ‘Britannic’ sentiment in Northeast Ireland where religious and cultural antipathy to the Catholic South was rapidly mutating into an ‘Ulster’ identity with ‘Britishness’ at its core.
¹⁴⁸
But, unlike the British minority in South Africa, which was forced to settle with the Afrikaner majority, Ulster (like the rest of Ireland) was represented in the British Parliament. It could rely on powerful allies in mainland politics to obstruct the progress of Home Rule. And, if the worst came to the worst, it could threaten civil war in the heart of the Empire.