A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain (39 page)

The colonial peoples themselves rated below even Latins in the pecking order of nations. Despite the fact that British imperial subjects included members of ancient – and undeniably great – civilizations such as China, India and Burma, these peoples were regarded as incapable of self-government. Britain, like France, saw its empire not only as an economic resource to be used for the benefit of the mother country but as the setting for a civilizing mission. Anglo-Saxon efficiency, enlightened religion, British values, sports and education would eventually render indigenous peoples fit to manage their own affairs, but this was not expected to happen soon. The British founded some excellent schools and colleges throughout their Empire – Raffles Institution in Singapore and Mayo College in India are examples – and these created a native elite with the skills and expectations appropriate to an educated class. That there were no opportunities for them to serve in higher administrative, academic or commercial posts created a frustration that was to increase throughout the period of British rule. Uninterested in their colonies until the latter half of the reign, the Queen’s subjects discovered an enthusiasm for the Empire only gradually. The title Empress of India, assumed by Victoria in 1877, awakened some pride, and the popularity of Empire increased so much in the following two decades that the Diamond Jubilee was treated more as a celebration of the country’s colonial might than of its ruler’s sixty-year reign.

The rush to acquire territories by other powers, including the new nations Germany and Italy, spurred Britain to action; the ‘Scramble for Africa’ in the eighties and nineties was expected to be followed by a Scramble for China, as Europe fought over any land or resources that became available. Though the British Government often did not want to take on the administration of further territories, it might do so to protect commercial interests, to acquire strategic positions or simply to prevent other nations from seizing them. Seeing their country as the heir to Ancient Rome, the British thought themselves better suited to the task of running other parts of the world than any nation. Their attitude was, frankly and unapologetically, that the more of the globe that was run by their countrymen, the better for civilization.

In many respects they were right. However fashionable it has since become to hate ‘colonialism’, a visit to any former European colony will indicate a legacy of roads, bridges, schools, churches and hospitals that has often served these communities very well. Planting and irrigation schemes have, often, similarly given lasting benefits to the territories concerned (the tea industry in India and Ceylon, for instance). What must be remembered is that, from the seventies onwards, when candidates for colonial administrative posts began to be selected by highly competitive examinations, the young men going out to run overseas territories were of the highest calibre that Britain could produce (the same was broadly true of the other great powers). They must not only have wisdom, common sense and adaptability, but be able to live under the constant gaze of the local and expatriate population, setting an example of incorruptible impartiality as representatives of the Crown. To an overwhelming extent they succeeded, providing one of the finest and fairest administrative bodies the world has seen.

Britain’s confidence was built on commercial, even more than military strength. As a seafaring nation and the discoverers of whole continents, the British had learned to make themselves at home all over the world. As a manufacturing nation they had built a vast network of trading links that had given them dominance over entire regions, as in East Asia. The country’s commercial network was far greater than its formal empire, covering places, such as Argentina, that were never British territory. No matter where an Englishman went, he would find British products, British traders or agents or representatives. He was always surrounded by familiar goods, accents, uniforms or faces. The knives and forks in a Russian hotel would prove to be from Sheffield. The boat that carried him up a West African river was likely to have been built on the Clyde. The house in which he stayed in Malaya might have been shipped from Birmingham in a crate and then assembled. The railway locomotive that carried him over the Andes might well have been made in Crewe, and the engine driver, the general manager and the engineers would be found to speak in the rich tones of British regions. In any corner of the earth, there was a chance that a Briton would meet some old acquaintance.

As well as the considerable – and expanding – number of territories throughout the world that were governed and garrisoned by Britain, there were informal communities of expatriates to be met with all over the globe. Apart from those who inhabited the French Riviera, or the hills around Florence, there were Welsh settlers in Patagonia who still spoke their native language, and in the Oporto region of Portugal there were English families that had lived for generations among the vineyards whose produce they exported to their homeland. In many instances the trappings of life in Britain – gentlemen’s
clubs, foxhunts, Anglican churches, cricket teams – were successfully transplanted in foreign soil.

The country’s trade had made Britain the world’s richest nation. This position was not to last, but for most of the nineteenth century Britain’s financial confidence, and pre-eminence, were unchallenged. Their nation’s wealth and financial know-how guaranteed respect for British merchants and, by extension, all of their compatriots. An Englishman abroad would expect the locals to honour his credit notes without demur, and he might well find, in banks or shipping agencies in foreign cities, a young clerk from Yorkshire or Scotland learning the ropes.

The British were not, of course, the only trading nation, but they had an important edge in their reputation for honesty and efficiency. With simple logic, they had long since decided that reliable service and financial probity were the best guarantee of satisfied customers and further orders, and they had succeeded in spreading all over the world this notion of themselves. In parts of South America the expression ‘hora Inglese’ (English hour) is still used to indicate punctuality. Because of Britain’s industrial pre-eminence, the goods they sold were usually as dependable as their timekeeping. The image they projected to others was one that they liked to believe themselves. A book that looked back at the nineties summed up their attitude to the rest of the world, and the way in which commercial and military might were often linked in the minds of others:

The vision of a Germany in arms had not [yet] come to discomfort. Nor had the sun of these United States. Pugilists and pork-packers and cowboys it might produce. Financiers–never!

Other empires might or might not have gone the way of all flesh. Not so the British Empire. Who was it that had been set over half the world? England. Who was it that knew how to manage the Indian or the African? England. Who had produced General Gordon, with a cane and a prayer instead of a gun and a curse? England. To whom did the Foreigner pay the secret adulation that vice pays to virtue? Victoria – that is, England. And about this there was a magnificent assurance which precluded hypocrisy. The British Business Man of that day may have been many things – he was never a hypocrite, and though an envious world called him that, it respected him and it especially respected his navy.
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While British traders and proconsuls presented the world with an façade of unshakeable self-confidence the reality was somewhat different. The country’s greatest asset had been the head start given it by the Industrial Revolution. This had enabled British firms to mass produce and export items that in other countries were still made, slowly and laboriously, by hand. It was inevitable, however, that any country that possessed sufficient raw materials and was able to raise, or attract from elsewhere, the requisite funds could have an industrial revolution of its own. This happened in France during the post-Napoleonic decades. It happened with increasing speed in Germany after the country’s unification (the German steel industry, in particular, became a serious and growing rival to Britain’s). It was most evident in the United States, which had been industrializing since the end of the eighteenth century. By the last years of the nineteenth it was evident that the future belonged to America. Their early advantage had made the British complacent, and they found themselves as the century went on in an increasingly crowded market-place. Foreign goods were often cheaper because labour costs were
lower and quality less important. The Paris Exhibition of 1867 showed how quickly France was catching up with British manufactures, and the
Annual Register
of that year lamented that the United Kingdom:

Owes her great influence not to military successes but to her commanding position in the arena of industry and commerce. If she forgets this, she is lost: not perhaps to the extent of being conquered and reduced to a province, but undoubtedly to the extent of giving up the lead, and ceasing to be a first-rate power. The signs, for those who can read, can be plainly seen.
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In 1870 James Anthony Froude, the historian and commentator, wrote that:

English opinion is without weight. English power is ridiculed. Our influence in the councils of Europe is a thing of the past. We are told, half officially, that it is time for us to withdraw altogether from the concerns of the Continent: while, on the other side of the Atlantic, Mr Emerson calmly intimates to an approving audience that the time is not far off when the Union must throw its protecting shield over us in our approaching decrepitude.
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This was, perhaps, somewhat alarmist. Britain was not a Continental power and did not expect her opinions there – unless she held the balance in wartime – to carry great weight. Disraeli, in any case, was to prove an influential figure at the Congress of Berlin in 1877. In the matter of America, Froude was nearer the mark, for that country’s power was increasing so relentlessly that even a long and costly civil war had not arrested its progress. The United States had apparently limitless natural resources, and despite possessing more than
enough living space for its large population, by the end of the century it had begun to acquire overseas territories. The famous poem by Rudyard Kipling in which he urged ‘Take up the white man’s burden’ was addressed to America, as a plea for the world’s new great power to take on the same role of benevolent responsibility as had the old.

With the defeat of Napoleon, Britain’s Empire had been expanded by several strategic new territories, including the Cape of Good Hope and Malta. The Royal Navy, which protected these colonies, was the strongest anywhere. The Army, though small by Continental standards, had seen off the French. Yet once the war was over complacency quickly set in, and the military establishment became the target for cuts. The British did not like standing armies or large peacetime navies and it has always been the practice to disband these forces as soon as possible. A standing army of 150,000 was no longer necessary, and the country in any case was suffering from a recession in the aftermath of the war. The Navy, too, was burdening the taxpayer. One task alone – that of guarding Napoleon in his mid-Atlantic prison at St Helena – was costing £300,000 a year. Retrenchment followed swiftly, with the Navy being reduced by 107,000 men by 1817. The Admiralty also continued to believe in the value of Britain’s traditional sailing ships and to resist any suggestion that it convert to steam power.

Throughout the century the Royal Navy was to enjoy immense prestige in the world. The skills of its sailors in manning a ship and in gunnery were unmatched by any rival. It acted as a highly successful international policeman, and no stretch of water in the world was beyond its reach. With no
feasible opponent to challenge it, the Navy devoted its efforts for several decades to stamping out the slave trade, not only stopping slaving ships on the high seas but raiding the assembly ports along the West African coast. As a result, more than 150,000 slaves were freed over a period of fifty years. Pirates were another problem. In 1816 British vessels forced the surrender of Algiers, a hornets’ nest of piracy for three hundred years. The last battle fought by British sailing ships was at Navarino Bay in October 1827. They, together with French and Russian fleets under overall British command, were assisting the Greeks in their struggle for independence from Ottoman rule, and the Turkish fleet was wiped out. The British public expected its sailors to give equally short shrift to any other international bully.

Between 1830, when he became Foreign Secretary, and 1865, when he died, Britain’s foreign policy was dominated by the personality of Lord Palmerston. Twice Prime Minister, he took a view of the world that was common among the upper and middle classes. He epitomized the smug confidence of the world’s richest nation and the home of the world’s most powerful fleet. He would brook no insult to the British flag anywhere in the world, and had no qualms about exercising his trademark ‘gunboat diplomacy’ in defence of national interests. This was no mere cliché. A British vessel sent to lie at anchor off a foreign coast was not only a threat of impending violence, but a symbol of the might that could be summoned to reinforce it.

On 30 November 1840, Acre, a Turkish possession in the Middle East, was bombarded with devastating effect, for one projectile hit the gunpowder magazine and blew up the entire
port. The local Turkish ruler, Mehmet Ali, withdrew from all his conquests in the region. Infamously, Britain also engaged the Chinese, who were attempting to end the opium trade that was being forced on them by the East India Company. After the seizure of an opium cargo in the Chinese port of Canton by local authorities, Palmerston sent a letter of protest. This was returned. There followed a period of insult and counter-insult, and punitive action by the British then began. The Navy bombarded Canton and several other ports. The island of Hong Kong was seized and the Chinese were forced, by the Treaty of Nangking in 1842, to accept a humiliating peace that opened several ports to British trade and ceded Hong Kong – a valuable entrepôt that would come to dominate trade in the region – to Britain for ever. The result of the opium wars was to confirm British mercantile dominance in the region, a position the United Kingdom would keep until the Second World War.