The Transformation of the World (99 page)

Throughout the nineteenth century, the British relationship to the rest of the world was based on a strong sense of a civilizing mission. This trope of a vocation to free other peoples from despotic rule and non-Christian superstitions rarely failed to produce its effect. Britain was the birthplace of humanitarian intervention, where the problem of human rights in relations between states was theorized (by John Stuart Mill, for example) in a way that is still topical today.
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Whereas the first three wars against the Indian state of Mysore were interpreted in terms of pure power politics, the fourth one—which ended in 1799 with victory over Tipu Sultan—already appeared in British propaganda as a liberation struggle against a Muslim tyrant.

Much more important for the British self-image, however, was the open campaigning against the slave trade, which in 1807 led to victory for the abolitionists in Parliament. In the following decades, it became a primary task of the Royal Navy to force slave ships ashore in third countries and to release their captive cargo. That such pan-interventionism also furthered British strategic interests was a gratifying side effect. But what it involved was less global maritime supremacy than, as Schumpeter put it, a “global maritime police.”
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The civilizing mission was to be performed pragmatically, without fanatical dogmatism. At best, a mere glance at the British model would be enough to convince anyone of its unsurpassable wisdom.

Of course, the actual successes of the British Empire cannot be explained only by collective autosuggestion. Three factors lay behind the imperial rise of the small archipelago in the North Sea: (1) the decline of Dutch commercial hegemony and the successes of the East India Company; (2) an increase in global
power during the Seven Years' War, reinforced by the Treaty of Paris (1763); and (3) the transition to territorial rule over wealthy regions of Asia capable of providing a handsome tribute. Moreover, since Britain's domestic finances were in better shape than those of any other state, and since its political elite had decided to make large and constant investments in a royal navy, the country was in a position to extinguish Napoleon's challenge at least at sea. As early as the 1760s the British elite had been the first in Europe to learn global thinking. Whereas it had previously been a question only of scattered possessions around the world, there was now a vision of a cohesive global empire; new approaches were devised in London and approved for general application.
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They were ocean oriented, but with an eye to possible rule on land—unlike the earlier Habsburg version of the idea of a universal empire. At the end of the Seven Years' War, the conception burst forth of a country with seemingly unlimited horizons of influence, if not actual rule. The loss of the thirteen American colonies was a severe setback. But the continuity of empire could be saved, because the East India Company, even before 1783, had introduced energetic reforms and placed its rule in (not yet over) India on a new and solid foundation.
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The Navy, Free Trade, and the British Imperial System

Even during the Napoleonic Wars, not everything went as the British planned: defeats had to be swallowed at Buenos Aires (1806) and in the war with the United States (1812). When Napoleon was safely in Saint Helena and the threat from continental Europe had receded (only with Russia was there a kind of cold war in Asia, the so-called Great Game), the British Empire took on its mature form. What were its foundations?

First
. Above-average population growth in the British Isles, together with an unusual propensity to emigrate (not to speak of deportation to Australia and elsewhere), produced demographic trends not seen in any other European country. Alongside the United States, first Canada and then the other dominions had a large British settlement that left a strong mark on their culture. Around 1900, smaller groups of British expatriates were to be found in India, Ceylon, and Malaya
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; in Kenya and Rhodesia; and in port colonies such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and Shanghai. These formed quite a cohesive British world, in language, religion, and lifestyle, a global Anglo-Saxon community in a far-flung but never isolated diaspora.
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Second
. Having gained a leading position at sea during the Seven Years' War, Britain could approach the showdown with Napoleonic France with the only navy capable of worldwide operations. This was the direct result of a unique mobilization of financial resources. Between 1688 and 1815 Britain's gross national product tripled in size, while tax revenue multiplied by a factor of fifteen. The British government could draw on a national income twice as high as that of the French. Since it raised most of its taxes indirectly from consumption, Britons
felt
their fiscal burden to be lighter than that of people across the Channel. In 1799
an income tax was introduced as an emergency measure, but this did last beyond the end of the wars; it won broad public acceptance and became a cornerstone of the British state. The foremost recipient of public funds was the Royal Navy.
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It could remain ready for action only because a global system of bases had already been purposefully created. At the end of the nineteenth century, there was no major waterway or strait in the world where the Royal Navy did not have a say.
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The navy rarely used its position to choke transport for strategic reasons (how easy that would have been in Gibraltar, Suez, Singapore, or even Cape Town!) or to hinder the trade of non-Britons. Its general objective, rather, was keep sea routes open and to prevent others from blocking access to them. All through the nineteenth century, Britain stood up for the principle of a
mare liberum
. Its maritime superiority did not rest only upon its material edge; it also had political causes. Since the activities of the Royal Navy did not appear threatening to European governments, they had no reason to engage in an arms race. In the second half of the nineteenth century, when France, Russia, the United States, Germany, and Japan strengthened their navies (while a country such as the Netherlands, which could have afforded a steamship fleet, kept out of the running), Britain still managed to retain its place far out in front. Another factor in this was the Royal Navy's superior logistics. Finally, British mastery on the world's seas and oceans was underpinned by a large and efficient commercial fleet; in 1890 the country still had more merchant tonnage than the rest of the world put together.
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Ocean carriers and sea travel made a significant contribution to Britain's balance of payments; some large fortunes were amassed in this domain.

Command of the seas made it unnecessary to maintain a large land army. The principle of “No standing armies!” continued to apply. Home defense was extremely skimpy, and on the eve of the First World War the largest section of the UK land forces was still in India. Created after 1770 out of a developed mercenary market in the Subcontinent, the Indian Army was paradoxically among the world's largest standing armies throughout the nineteenth century. It served more purposes than one. Along with the bureaucracy, it was the second “steel frame” (as Prime Minister David Lloyd George put it in 1922) that held the Indian giant together, but it also functioned as a colonial task force that could be deployed elsewhere in Asia or Africa, or even for police operations in the International Settlement in Shanghai, where Sikh soldiers' brutal behavior triggered Chinese mass protests as late as 1925.
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Third
. Up to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Britain had the most efficient economy in the world. By 1830 it had become the “workshop of the world,” its light industry supplying markets on every continent. A majority of iron ships, railroads, and textile machines were built in Britain; it offered goods not available anywhere else, and with them came consumption models that took root elsewhere and helped in turn to spread and stabilize the demand for such goods. The high productivity of the British economy made it possible to sell export products at a low price, undercutting all kinds of competitors. Those who
needed it also received cheap credit. The opportunities of empire were exploited by private companies, while the state itself, faithful to its liberal creed, practiced a hands-off approach. British businessmen could rely less than their French or (after 1871) German counterparts on local state action, even though UK diplomats and consuls all over the world looked to them as sources of information. Often the activities of businessmen contributed to the very instability that later offered politicians an excuse for intervention.
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A kind of chain reaction generated a constant buildup of interests and openings. Thus, the imperial structures gave rise now and then to private economic empires that cared little about the limits of formal British sovereignty.

Unlike the empires of the eighteenth century, the British Empire in the high Victorian era was an enabling system for global capitalist operations. In this it also differed fundamentally from mercantilist formations, which sealed themselves off through external economic controls and monopolies, organizing themselves for economic warfare with neighboring empires. The dismantling—or, to use a more positive term, liberalizing—of its economic policy was the greatest contribution of the British state to an imperial system stretching far beyond the colonial territories under its formal rule. It was a twin-track process. In 1849 Westminster repealed the seventeenth-century Navigation Acts, under which all imports to England or Britain had to be carried in ships belonging either to British nationals or to citizens of the exporting country. Dutch middlemen were the first to feel the effects. By midcentury the economic freedom of the seas had been established.

The second track was the abolition of the Corn Law tariffs, a major theme of British domestic politics in the 1840s. In fact, the tariffs had only been introduced in 1815, to prevent the grain market from collapsing as a result of overproduction and rising imports. Purchases from abroad were prohibited unless and until the price of grain on the internal market reached a certain level. Corresponding to farmers' interests, this form of agricultural protection encountered growing opposition from manufacturers, who considered that artificially high food prices held back the demand for industrial goods. Furthermore, the system came under heavy fire as a symbol of aristocratic privilege. Sir Robert Peel, a leader of the mainly protectionist Tories, opposed powerful forces in his party and appealed to the interests of the country as a whole when as prime minister he pushed through the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 (it actually took effect three years later). A series of other measures to liberalize foreign trade followed in the 1850s, the breakthrough period for free trade, and the end of grain tariffs was soon viewed across party lines as a token of economic progress.
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It was unprecedented, indeed revolutionary, that Britain took these steps unilaterally, without expecting equivalent action from its trading partners. However, they unleashed a chain reaction—an appropriate image, since the United Kingdom never convened a major international conference to decide upon a new world economic order. The rapid spread of free trade meant that by the mid-1860s
tariffs had been largely dismantled between European states; the Continent became a free-trade area, from the Pyrenees to the Russian border. Free trade also prevailed within the empire. In the surest sign of their growing strength, the dominions were able by the end of the century to carve out space for their own independent tariff policies. But where the free world market (dominated by Britain because of its production superiority) ran up against trade barriers, energetic measures were taken to remove them, with the whole British elite in support.
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Official doctrine saw national market protection—recommended by the US treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton in 1791, and the German economist Friedrich List in 1831, to prevent a flood of British goods—as the expression of an unacceptable civilization deficit. The Latin American republics in the 1820s, the Ottoman Empire in 1838, China in 1842, Siam in 1855, and Japan in 1858 were compelled to relinquish virtually all market protection in a series of free-trade agreements, mostly obtained through the threat or use of military force. This paradoxical phenomenon has been described as “imperialism of free trade.”
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The global system of free trade offered extraordinary scope for British interests. But since it rested upon equal treatment for all and a strict antimonopolism, it was in principle equally open to members of other nations. The stronger European and American economies became, the slimmer were the advantages that British industry (finance was more robust) could derive from its waning superiority. Although most European countries reverted to tariffs after 1878, and although the United States seldom deviated from a basic protectionist mood that often clashed with its demand for the opening of
other
markets, the United Kingdom held firm to its free-trade policy. This enjoyed a broad consensus in British society, stretching far beyond economic lobbies into the heart of the working class, and by century's end it had become a pillar of the political culture and a basic emotional theme in the national self-consciousness.
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The persistence of this unilaterialism is as astonishing as its original appearance in the middle of the century.

With its worldwide imperial system, Britain exercised a kind of benign—as opposed to predatory—hegemony. It made public goods available free of charge: law and order on the high seas (including the war on residual piracy), property rights beyond national and cultural boundaries, voluntary migration flows, an egalitarian and generally applicable system of customs duties, and a set of free-trade agreements that included everyone by virtue of most-favored-nation clauses. The latter provisions, the key legal mechanism of global liberalization, implied that the most favorable terms of an agreement automatically applied to all who participated in it.
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