Chapter 19
In This Chapter
● Creating an empire without meaning to: How the British did it
● Building empire in America, India, Australia, New Zealand, China, and Africa
● Understanding what went wrong in India and South Africa
A historian once said that the British got their Empire in ‘a fit of absence of mind’, as if they’d gone out to the shops one day and come back with a huge Empire without any recollection of having bought it. Some truth exists in the idea. The point is that no one ever sat down and said, ‘Right, this Empire then. Which bits of the world are we going to need?’ Empire building was much more haphazard, and the British often opposed it. After all, if you take somewhere over, you’ve got to defend it and maintain it, and doing so costs money. And ultimately, money was one of the main things British imperialism was all about.
Figure 19-1 shows the Empire at the peak of its expansion in 1920. Many of the countries in the Empire at this time had been taken from Germany at the end of the Great War (see Part VI for more on the later history of the Empire); other countries - such as the American colonies - would have featured on an earlier map, but had long since been independent by this time (see Chapter 17 to find out why).
Anyone writing about the British Empire nowadays has a problem. On the one hand, the Empire was an appalling story of greed, cruelty, massacre, genocide, theft, and pretty cynical self-interest by white Europeans exploiting weaker people all over the world. But Empire was also a tale of high hopes and dreams, of enormous energy and enterprise, of people who really did believe they were making the world a better place and helping those less fortunate than themselves. The Empire spread huge technological and political advantages all around the globe, but it did so at a terrible and shameful cost in human suffering. For historians, getting the balance in the story right can be tricky.
Figure 19-1: The British Empire, 1920
New World Order
To understand how the British Empire got started, you have to go back to the sixteenth century and Tudor times - doublets and hose, and men with doilies round their necks (see Part IV to find more about these people). An Italian sailor called Giovanni Caboto arrived at the court of King Henry VII. Would the king be interested in stumping up the cash for a voyage to the New World? Now, a few years earlier Henry had turned Columbus down, and he didn’t want to make the same mistake again. So he said yes, and John Cabot - the English couldn’t cope with his real name - sailed west until he hit ‘Newfound-land’. He didn’t know it, but he was also founding the British Empire.
Newfoundland proved very good for fish, which was big business in those days - no meat allowed on Fridays or in Lent, so demand was high - but what the English really wanted was to get into the highly profitable spice trade with the East, and to do that they needed to get past the New World and on to Asia, if they could only find the way through. But they couldn’t. One group did try to settle in the New World in Henry VIII’s reign, but found so little food there, they ended up eating each other. So by Elizabeth I’s time, the English had come up with a much better way of making money out of America: Robbery.
Imperial Spain was the world superpower, thanks in part to her South American gold and silver mines. The Spanish forced the locals to mine it and then shipped it off to Spain. The English simply ambushed the ships (see Chapter 11 for more about these English sea dogs).
Colonies in the New World
In Elizabeth I’s reign (1558-1603) the English had their second go at setting up a colony in America.
In 1584 Sir Walter Raleigh found a site at Roanoke in Virginia (named after Elizabeth, the ‘Virgin Queen’), but the colony only lasted a year. By the time a second colony was set up at Jamestown in 1607 King James I’s anti-smoking drive had reduced the demand for tobacco. Virginia collapsed. In addition, the colonists tried to swindle the local tribes, so they massacred the colonists.
The failure of the Virginia colonies would’ve been the end of the story of British colonialism had it not been for all the religious strife back in England. (Have a look at Chapter 13 to see what this was all about.) The Pilgrim Fathers, the most famous religious refugees in history, hired the Mayflower in 1620, sailed to the New World, landed in Massachusetts, and set up another colony. That this group made it through the first winter was a bit of a miracle - and solely due to the local tribes who stepped in and lent a hand - but the colony survived. In 1630 John Winthrop led another group of Puritans to Massachusetts, and two years later Catholic colonists arrived in Maryland. The Scots decided to join in with a Scottish colony at what they called Nova Scotia (New Scotland), and this may have worked had it not been for politics: Charles I lost a war with France, and as part of the peace deal, he agreed to hand Nova Scotia over to the French.
By the end of the century, the English had enough colonies in the New World to rival the French and the Spanish.
Hey, sugar sugar
Initially, the English didn’t really know why they wanted the colonies. When the government asked the Pilgrim Fathers what they intended doing in the New World once they arrived, the Pilgrim Fathers looked a bit embarrassed and mumbled something about maybe doing a bit of fishing.
Once the English got to the New World, of course, they found all sorts of useful things to sell. They found furs - European winters were getting a lot colder then, so these were very welcome - tobacco, fish, and potatoes. But the king of all products, the one that brought the pound signs to the eyes, the one that really mattered, was sugar.
Sugar made all the travails of colonisation worthwhile. You could eat it, shape it, use it to sweeten anything from cakes to drinks, and sugar tasted good! But harvesting sugar took a lot of hard work - which is why this British Empire in the New World was based so heavily upon slavery. To see the sordid connection between the sugar and slave trades, refer to Chapter 16. The crucial fact to know here is that the slave trade made the sugar islands rich, so rich, in fact, that the British seriously considered giving Canada back to the French in return for just one sugar island in the Caribbean. Even ports that never saw a slave made money out of the slave trade. Bristol and Liverpool were small seaside towns: The slave trade made them the richest ports in Britain.
After many years of arguing about the slave trade, the British finally abolished it in 1807 and abolished slavery throughout the British Empire in 1833. By then they’d worked out a way of growing sugar beet at home, so less need for slave labour in the Caribbean colonies existed anyway.
India Taken Away
The story of the British in India begins on the very last day of the sixteenth century, when a group of merchants met in London to set up the East India Company to conduct trade with the East. The first Englishman to go out, Sir Thomas Roe, worked out a very good deal with the Mughal Emperor which gave the English a trading base in Surat on the west coast. Then King Charles II (you can find out more about him in Chapter 13) married a Portuguese princess called Catherine de Braganza, and she gave him the Indian port of Bombay (Mumbai) as a wedding present!
Gradually the English, like the French and the Portuguese, who also had trading bases in India, got sucked into the violent and unpredictable world of Indian politics, which basically meant taking sides in a series of very complex and bloody civil wars. These European trading companies began to set up their own armed forces of Indian soldiers under European officers, and by the eighteenth century the British East India Company (we can call it British by the eighteenth century - see Chapter 15 to find out why) had a full-scale army with which to square up to the French East India Company - and its own full-scale army. In 1751 the British Company’s army, under its rather wild young commander Robert Clive, defeated the French Company army at Arcot and more or less drove the French out of southern India.
Black Hole in Calcutta
In 1756 the British heard disturbing news from Bengal: The Nawab of Bengal had attacked the British garrison in his capital, Calcutta, beaten them and taken many of them prisoner. He locked them up in a small cellar overnight, but the night was stiflingly hot, and in the morning many of the prisoners had died. This cellar became known as the Black Hole of Calcutta.
The ‘Black Hole of Calcutta’ is important, because it was one of the main reasons the British gave for taking India over, and for years British children learned about the incident as a terrible atrocity and a sure sign that Indians weren’t to be trusted. Exactly how many people died is a matter of some dispute. The British claimed that 146 men were locked in and only 23 survived, but historians dispute this, and in any case whether the deaths were intended is by no means clear. As so often in history, what actually happened isn’t what matters so much as what people thought had happened. The British were convinced that the Nawab killed the men deliberately, and they set out for revenge. And that revenge meant regime change in Bengal.
Clive headed north and met the Nawab and his French allies at Plassey in 1757. Clive had 3,000 men, British and Indian; the Nawab had 68,000 Bengali and French troops. Think of that ratio as 3 against 68. Yet Clive won. How? Easy. He cheated (mind you, with odds like that, who can blame him). Clive made a secret deal with the Nawab’s relative, Mir Jaffir. If Mir Jaffir would keep his troops out of the battle, the British would put him on the throne of Bengal. Which they did, though much good being on the throne did him. After Plassey, the Mughal Emperor handed Bengal over to the British, so Mir Jaffir was no more than a puppet controlled by a British governor. He was the first of many.
The Battle of Warren Hastings
Everyone knew what went on in the East India Company: Shady dealings, back-handers, and chaotic accounting. By the 1770s the company was nearly bankrupt (think Enron). Clive was hauled back to England to face corruption charges. The man sent out to India to clean things up was Warren Hastings. He’d studied Indian culture and languages, and he was very good at admin. Unfortunately, Hastings was also very difficult to get on with. He was embroiled in bitter arguments with the three-man council he was supposed to work with and even wounded one of them in a duel, which didn’t help. During his time in office a terrible famine also hit Bengal, which killed five million people - a third of the entire population.
Hastings’ enemies had friends in London, and they got him recalled to face a long list of charges. The trial was held in Parliament with some of the leading Whig politicians heading up the prosecution (see Chapter 15 to find out about who the Whigs were). The trial dragged on for years. Eventually Hastings was found not guilty, but his career was in ruins. The government decided leaving India to be governed by a private company was no good, and it started gradually taking over India itself.
Great game, great game!
After Warren Hastings (see the preceding section) the British took a new line in India. Instead of trying to fit into the Indian way of doing things, they would make the Indians do things the British way: British laws and British education. They stopped bothering to learn Indian languages and Indian history and even let Christian missionaries in. But the British were worried about the Russians moving in, too - if you look at a map, you’ll see that idea wasn’t completely silly. So the Brits sent spies and secret agents up to the North West Frontier to keep an eye on the Russians. They called this intriguing the ‘Great Game’. India’s neighbours were going to join in the game, whether they liked it or not:
● Afghanistan, 1839-42: The British were afraid that the Russians were going to invade India through Afghanistan, so they sent an army into Kabul and put their own man in charge, a hapless character called Shah Sujah. The Afghans knew a British puppet when they saw one. They started shooting British soldiers in Kabul and took command of the narrow passes through the mountains, so the British were cut off. When the British finally did retreat, the Afghans shot them to pieces. Then they did the same to Shah Sujah.
Invasions of Afghanistan have a habit of going badly wrong. The British imposed another puppet government in 1878 and the Afghans overthrew that one, too. The British had to launch a Second Afghan War and even after that conflict they still didn’t have much control of the country. In 1980 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and installed a pro-Russian government, but after eight years of guerrilla fighting they too had to pull out. The Americans invaded Afghanistan in 2002 in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, which had been backed by the Afghan Islamic regime, the Taliban. Just like the British in the nineteenth century, the Americans conquered the country fairly easily and then found themselves fighting an ever larger and fiercer guerrilla war. Afghanistan is one area of the world where knowing your history is well worth the effort!
● Sind, 1843: British commander Charles Napier took the North West Indian state of Sind basically in revenge for what had happened in Afghanistan the year before. You could call the attack unprovoked aggression, and you’d be right. According to legend, he even sent a joke message - Peccavi!, which means ‘I have sinned’ in Latin. Get it?
● Punjab: This Sikh kingdom was falling into chaos after its great ruler Ranjit Singh died. The Sikhs invaded British territory, and after two tremendously bloody campaigns (1845-6 and 1848-9), the British drove them back and took over.
● Burma: The British attacked Burma three times (1824-6; 1852; 1885-6) and finally took the whole country over. Why? Mainly so the French couldn’t have it. Burmese opinion didn’t feature in the decision.
This is mutiny, Mr Hindu!
What, you may ask, did the Indians think of what the British were doing? The British hardly seemed to wonder. They assumed the Indians were happy and that everything was hunky-dory. Boy, were they wrong. In 1857 India rose in revolt, for three main reasons:
● The ‘Lapse’ rule: This was an interesting system the British came up with for when an Indian ruler died. If no heir existed according to British rules, then the succession ‘lapsed’ to Britain -that is, the British took it over. The fact that an Indian heir existed according to Indian rules didn’t count!
● Greased cartridges: Indian soldiers, or sepoys, were issued with new bullets that were coated in grease. According to the rumours, the grease was either cow fat, which Hindus couldn’t touch, or pig fat, which Muslims couldn’t touch. Whatever the truth was, the British told the sepoys to stop grumbling and use the bullets.
● An old prophesy: An old story said that British rule would end a hundred years after the battle of Plassey in 1757. Now it was 1857. Spooky!
In 1857 the sepoys at Meerut in northern India refused to use the bullets, killed their officers, and started a huge rising against British rule. They dragged the old Mughal emperor out of his happy retirement and told him he was to lead them; various Indian rulers seized the chance to get their kingdoms back; and the British found themselves cut off in towns like Cawnpore (Kanpur) and Lucknow.
Make no mistake: This rebellion was very bloody. At Kanpur, the Indians cut the bodies of British women and children up and threw them down a well.
The British sewed captured Muslims up in pig skins, hanged prisoners from trees without any sort of trial, made Indians lick blood up from the ground, and used an old Indian practice of tying prisoners to cannons and blowing them to pieces. Afterwards, both sides were deeply shocked by the violence. The British government took over completely from the old East India Company and tried - very reluctantly - to give Indians more of a say in governing the country. The Indian Mutiny, as the British insisted on calling this event, was a terrible warning of what could happen if they got governing India wrong.
Cook’s Tour: Australia and New Zealand
While the British were busy conquering India (see the preceding section), some very different empire building was going on further south. The British had got keenly interested in the possible uses of exotic plants, and the Admiralty sent out ships, like HMS Bounty, to go and find them. We all know what happened to the Bounty, but Captain Cook on HMS Endeavour was rather more successful. In 1770 he sailed into such a rich collection of plants that he called the place Botany Bay (in what is now New South Wales, Australia), and claimed it for Britain before going on to explore the rest of the Pacific. The people who actually lived at Botany Bay had tried to stop Cook and his men from landing. And they weren’t the only Pacific islanders who smelt trouble when the British arrived - Cook was killed by islanders in Hawaii - but the British weren’t going to let his murder stop them.
The British were used to sending prisoners over to the American colonies - it was cheaper than looking after them in prison - but after America became independent, they had to look elsewhere. ‘How about Botany Bay?’ asked some bright spark. ‘It’s on the other side of the world, so if they do survive, there’s a good chance they won’t come back.’ The first shipload arrived in 1788.
The convicts were treated like animals, even though the only crime some of them had committed was stealing a loaf of bread to feed their family at home. When these prisoners were released, they simply pushed the Aborigines off their land. But the situation was much, much worse in Tasmania. Tasmania’s a small island with lots of poisonous snakes, so the British thought it was the ideal place to dump their hardest criminals. These bushrangers, as they were called, hunted the Aborigines for sport - with official encouragement. Within seventy years the Aborigines were dead. All of them. If you want an example of genocide, British Tasmania is a good place to start.
New Zealand didn’t escape. The Maoris were luckier than the Tasmanians - the Brits had a habit of recognising some peoples as ‘noble savages’, normally based on how well they fought, and they reckoned the Maoris fitted the bill. By the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, the Maoris handed the country over to the British and the British nobly refrained from wiping them out. Instead, they flooded New Zealand with European settlers and simply drove the Maoris off their land. Depressingly familiar scene, isn’t it?
Opium? Just Say Yes: China
With all of the wars the Brits fought to secure land and routes throughout the world, a pretence could at least be made that the British were trying to promote trade or good government or something. But even at the time, the British themselves couldn’t come up with much of an excuse for the opium wars with China.
The East India Company found that it could make a packet by exporting opium to China, despite all the Chinese government could do to stop it. When the Chinese raided the drugs ships and warehouses in 1839, the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston (Palmerston and his highly original approach to international peace and harmony is covered in Chapter 18), sent a fleet of gunboats to Canton and opened fire. The Chinese had to give up Hong Kong, agree to let the British pump them as full as opium as they liked, and not to stop honest British drug peddlers ever again. But the Chinese did try to stop the dealers. In 1856 the Chinese arrested a British ship for piracy; the Brits invaded China again. Invasion was even easier this time because a civil war was going on in China and the British had the French on their side. They took Beijing and forced the Chinese to open even more of their ports to British trade.
A Franklin's tale
One thing the Brits never gave up on was the idea that a way must exist into the Pacific round the north of Canada. (A way does exist, but so far into the Arctic Circle that it's hardly worth bothering about.) In 1845 Sir John Franklin, a naval commander, Trafalgar veteran, and former governor of Tasmania, set off with two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, to find that wretched
North West Passage. And he probably did find the passage, but he never came back to tell the tale. The two ships got trapped in the ice, and the men tried to get home over land. Even though they had the latest tinned food, none of them made it home. In the 1980s some of the bodies were found, perfectly preserved by the cold. They'd died from lead poisoning from the tins.
In the twentieth century, the Chinese called all these nineteenth-century agreements ‘unequal treaties’ and refused to consider themselves bound by them. This refusal is what lay behind the Chinese government’s determination to get Hong Kong back from Britain in 1997 - which it did.
Wider Still and Wider: Scrambling for Africa
You may not guess this detail from everything so far, but until the 1880s, the British weren’t actually all that interested in getting colonies. They cost a lot of money for no very obvious return. But in the 1880s, something changed. Suddenly the British became really keen on their Empire. They didn’t just like their Empire, they believed in it. They started calling it ‘The Empire on which the sun never sets’ - a name with two meanings: One, the Empire was spread so far around the globe that the sun was always shining on some part of it, and two, that it would go on for ever. They called their Empire one of the greatest forces for good the world had ever seen. And they started taking over more and more of the world’s surface, especially in Africa.
For a long time, the Victorians didn’t really ‘do’ Africa. They thought of Africa as the ‘Dark Continent’, full of jungle and disease and - well, no one really knew. The man who changed the popular opinion of Africa was David Livingstone, the Scottish physician and missionary who first went out there in 1841. Everyone loved reading his reports. And they began to dream. Maybe there was more to Africa than they thought? Like gold? Or diamonds? Or power . . . ?
Dr Livingstone, I presume?
In a story with precious few heroes, David Livingstone does stand out as a good guy. Everyone liked him - except slave traders. He was a doctor and a missionary, and he went to Africa to spread the gospel, heal the sick, and find out a bit more about the place. He managed all three. Unlike the people who came after him, Livingstone respected the Africans and didn't seek to disrupt their way of life. A tale exists that he once found some diamonds but threw them away because he knew what would happen if other people found them. He would have been horrified if he'd been able to see what would happen as a result of his reports. He got a taste of future events when he met Henry Morton Stanley, the Welshman sent out by the New York Herald to 'find Livingstone'. (Livingstone wasn't actually lost; it was just that everyone else wanted to know where he was.) Stanley was an appalling man, dishonest and a sadist to boot - thinking of anyone less suited to working with Livingstone is difficult. Livingstone died loved by all and was buried in Westminster Abbey; Stanley went on to help King Leopold of the Belgians set up a brutal tyranny in the Congo. He got a knighthood (a British one).
Zulu!
Okay, you’ve seen Michael Caine and the gallant Welsh holding off the entire Zulu army - thahsands of them. But what really happened? This story is about two empires, one British, one Zulu. The Brits come into the story when they took the Cape of Good Hope - that area’s the bottom bit of South Africa - off the Dutch in 1795, during the French Revolutionary Wars (see Chapter 17 to find out what these wars were all about). The Cape of Good Hope was such a handy base to have, halfway between Britain and India, that the British decided to keep it. The Dutch didn’t like losing the Cape, and they liked it even less when the British abolished slavery in 1833. The Dutch lived by slavery. So they upped sticks and set off on the Great Trek to get away from the British and find some new Africans they could enslave.
The Dutch set up two states, called the Transvaal and the Orange Free State; while the British were left thinking ‘Wouldn’t it be a good idea if we could take over the Dutch areas?’ but not doing anything about it. Yet.
Meanwhile, a small local tribe called the Zulu was doing rather well for itself under its - shall we say, totally ruthless? - king, Shaka and setting up a large empire which even made the Dutch very nervous. In 1879 the Dutch asked the British for help and the British Governor of Cape Colony, Sir Bartle Frere, came up with a Cunning Plan. ‘Why not help the Dutch by picking a fight with the Zulu (who had no quarrel with the British) and wiping them out? The Dutch will be so grateful, they won’t notice when we take their land over as well.’ Not a great exponent of moral philosophy was Sir Bartle Frere. So in 1879, without any provocation, a British army under Lord Chelmsford invaded Zululand. And immediately hit trouble.
The Zulu wiped out an entire British army column at Isandhlwana. The British had guns, but they couldn’t open the ammunition boxes because they hadn’t brought the right spanners! The Zulu went on to attack the small base at Rorke’s Drift - the battle re-enacted in the film Zulu, and yes the Welsh did hold them off, though by rifle fire rather than massed Welsh male voices singing (though that tactic would’ve done just as well). Bartle Frere’s little plan was going badly wrong.
Ultimately, the British won: Even Lord Chelmsford couldn’t lose a whole campaign with rifles and cannon against spears and shields. But even worse events were to come.
The wild Boers
Two years later, the British marched into the two Dutch republics (see the section above). They thought the Dutch Boers (farmers) would be only too pleased for British protection, but they weren’t. They fought back, and these
farmers proved deadly accurate marksmen: They slaughtered the British at the Battle of Majuba Hill. The Brits pulled out of the Transvaal as fast as they could run. (For the second round of these Anglo-Boer wars, see the section ‘The Anglo-Boer War: A hell of a lesson and a hell of a shock’ a bit later on in this chapter.)
One for you and two for me: Cutting up Africa
After being cut to pieces by the Zulu and by the Boers, you’d think the British would have had enough of Africa, but you’d be wrong. Within a year they were back, this time in Egypt. Egypt was important to Britain because of the Suez Canal - easily the best way to Britain’s colonies in India and the Far East, and the canal was run by the French and British governments. So, in effect, was Egypt, which is why an Egypt-for-the-Egyptians movement got going. So Gladstone, of all people (and see Chapter 18 to see why this detail was so surprising) sent in a military force under Sir Garnet Wolseley to deal with the insurrection. Which he did, though the British now found they were lumbered with all Egypt’s problems, whether they liked it or not.
Khartoum capers
Egypt’s biggest problem was the Sudan, which was ruled by Egypt but didn’t want to be. A big Muslim fundamentalist rising was going on in the Sudan, led by the Mahdi (a sort of Muslim Messiah). The government in Cairo sent an army into the Sudan to deal with the Mahdi under a British officer called Hicks, but Hicks and his men got wiped out (this was becoming a habit). Gladstone decided enough military disasters had occurred in Africa, and that Cairo (which was now controlled from London, don’t forget) pulling out of the Sudan altogether would be best. Some Egyptian civil servants and Europeans still resided in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, so in 1884 Gladstone sent General George Gordon to get them out. Bad choice.
Gordon was another religious fanatic, but this time a Christian one. He wanted a trial of strength with the Mahdi, so instead of evacuating Khartoum, he fortified it. He didn’t have many troops but he hoped that Gladstone would send him some. Gladstone thought Gordon should have stuck to his instructions, and refused to send him any reinforcements - even though the press and the queen were screaming at him to do so. He finally gave in and sent a force out to Khartoum, but too late: The Mahdi had taken Khartoum and Gordon was dead. Public opinion in Britain was outraged (they changed Gladstone’s nickname G.O.M - Grand Old Man - to M.O.G - Murderer of Gordon) but Gladstone thought his fate served Gordon right.
The other countries in Europe didn’t see why the British should have all the fun in Africa. So the French started taking over North and West Africa, the Italians moved into Tripoli (Libya) and Ethiopia (though they moved out again pretty sharpish when the Ethiopians whipped them), and the Germans moved into East Africa. King Leopold of the Belgians took over the entire Congo basin as a sort of private estate and ran it as a massive slave labour camp. The period was a mad scramble - the Scramble for Africa.
The British, of course, didn’t like all these foreigners moving in on ‘their’ area, so they started taking more land, too. Sometimes they set up companies, like the Royal Niger Company which created Nigeria by drawing straight lines on maps right through different tribal areas. This arbitrary creation is why Nigeria fell apart in civil war in 1967 and why Nigeria remains a deeply divided country to this day.
Cecil Rhodes, the gung-ho British prime minister of Cape Colony, dreamed of running a railway on British territory all the way ‘from Cairo to the Cape’; unfortunately, the French had a similar idea, only they wanted French territory across Africa from West to East. Someone was going to have to give.
Welcome to the Middle of Nowhere
The big showdown between the British and the French in Africa happened at a tiny place called Fashoda in the Sudan. Nothing exists at Fashoda. Nobody wanted it, probably not even the Fashodans. But in 1898, Fashoda hit the headlines when it was the meeting place for two very different military expeditions:
● The British, heading North to South: A large British army under General Hubert Kitchener had set out to conquer the Sudan and to get revenge for what happened to Gordon (see the preceding section, ‘Khartoum capers’).
● The French heading West to East: A small French expedition consisting of Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand, three bearers, and a dog, but with a very big French flag, was out to claim the Sudan for la Belle France.
Kitchener’s men won the battle of Omdurman against the Sudanese due to them having taken the precaution of stocking up on machine guns for mowing the enemy down in large numbers. Just as they were settling down to their post-massacre tea and biccies, French Captain Marchand arrived and, after much bowing and saluting, told them, in a very high voice, to kindly get the hell off French territory - Zut alors! General Kitchener told the little chap that he admired his courage but that he had ten thousand British troops at his back plus a large number of cannon and, if Captain Marchand didn’t turn round and march back the way he’d come pretty sharpish, he’d feel the imprint of some of their boots on his backside. ‘Zis means war!’ fumed Captain Marchand, as he sat down to write a very stiff postcard to Paris.
And, unbelievably, the incident nearly did cause a war.
The French took {’affaire Fachoda very seriously (they still do). When the British had stopped laughing, they gently reminded the French that, at that stage, the French had only one friend in the world and that was the Russians, and they weren’t going to lift a finger to help. The whole situation blew over. No, my friends, when it came to fighting wars in Africa with the whole world lined up against you, no one could touch the Brits. (You can see this British characteristic in the section ‘The Anglo-Boer War - one hell of a lesson and one hell of a shock’, later in this chapter.)
The Colonies Grow Up - As Long As They’re White
If you’d asked British people in the nineteenth century what their Empire was for, they’d say that they were governing all these people until they were ready to govern themselves. And if you asked when that might be, they’d point proudly to colonies that were doing just that:
● Canada: The French Canadians couldn’t stand the English, English couldn’t stand the French, and the whole place had had to be divided in two back in the eighteenth century. By 1867 the country’s all joined together again and allowed to govern itself.
● Australia: Complete shambles, especially after the gold rush of 1851. Proper government introduced state by state until, in 1901, the Aussies are ready to rule themselves. Damn shame we taught them to play cricket. Perhaps they’d teach us.
● New Zealand: Economy doing well. Lots of sheep. Gold there, too.
More sheep. Ready to govern itself by 1907. Did I mention the sheep?
If you happened to point out that this steady march to self-government seemed a tad white, you’d get a lot of talk about how, of course, coloured people weren’t so well advanced, and would take longer to be ready to govern themselves, and it wasn’t in their nature, and so on and so on. And if you persisted, you might learn about the riots in Jamaica, which the British took as proof that some people (read that as non-white people) needed British rule (read that white British rule) for their own good. For the details about the events in Jamaica, see the sidebar ‘Rum goings-on in Jamaica’.
Rum goings-on in Jamaica
Jamaica's economy collapsed when Britain got rid of slavery in 1833 and didn't think through what to put in its place. By the 1860s the blacks in Jamaica were desperately poor and asked the government to reduce their rents. When the government said no, a group of women marched into Kingston and stoned some sentries. All hell broke loose. Very serious rioting occurred, with sickening violence. One man had his tongue torn out, another was thrown into a burning building, a third was literally hacked to pieces - and then Governor Edward Eyre took a hand.
Eyre hunted the rioters down and shot or hanged them without even stopping to inquire if they had had anything to do with riots. He even made the rioters hang each other. He had a thousand homes burned to the ground and 600 people flogged, often with wire whips. He reckoned the trouble had all been caused by the Reverend G. W. Gordon, a member of Jamaica's House of Assembly - the Jamaican Parliament - so he had him arrested and hanged, and no, he didn't bother with a trial. The Reverend Gordon was black, you see.
What happened to Eyre? He was sacked and recalled to face trial. Some people thought he was a murderer, others thought he was a hero. The trial found him Not Guilty. One last point, though. Before the trouble, Jamaica had at least given black people the vote. Now they lost it. Hardly worth abolishing slavery, was it?
Lion Tamers
A lot of people will tell you that the British won their Empire by using cannon and machine guns against people armed with spears and clubs, but that view is by no means always true. In many cases - India is a good example - they were up against people as well armed and trained as they were. People always existed who were ready to stand up to the British and tell them where to get off.
What about the Irish?
The Irish were very active in the Empire, but they didn’t see why they should be treated as a colony at home. Despite the Act of Union (see Chapter 15 to see the shenanigans when that was passed), a British colony was more or less what Ireland was, with thousands of Irish tenants kept in utter poverty by landlords who often couldn’t even be bothered to come and visit their own estates. So the Irish decided to initiate change.
They campaigned for a fairer system of rents - you know, a system that didn’t involve them being evicted and having their cottages demolished by the local constabulary. The campaign got nasty: Landlords who evicted tenants were boycotted - completely shunned, as if they’d got the plague - and if that tactic didn’t work they often got shot. Gladstone’s government gave the police special powers to lock people up, but in the end, Parliament had to tackle the rent question, and it did, quite successfully. (If they’d tackled the problem to start with, they’d have saved everyone a lot of bother.)
By then, however, the Irish had moved on to the question of Home Rule, which didn’t quite mean being independent, but did mean getting the Irish Parliament back (see Chapter 15 for why they’d lost it in the first place). The leader of the Home Rule League was an Irish Protestant MP called Charles Stuart Parnell (pronounced Parnul), and he knew just how to drive Prime Minister William Gladstone up the wall. He obstructed parliamentary business by just talking for hours on end (and when his throat gave way another Irish MP took over) until he forced Gladstone to do something about Home Rule. Parnell’s own role had to stop when his love affair with Kitty O’Shea - er, Mrs Kitty O’Shea - became public knowledge, but by then Gladstone had decided that he’d always believed in Home Rule anyway. Unfortunately Parliament didn’t agree: Gladstone split his party and in 1886 his Home Rule bill was thrown out. He tried again in 1893 with a stronger majority, but this time the House of Lords threw the bill out. The Irish were going to have to wait for Home Rule.
The Anglo-Boer War: A hell of a lesson and a hell of a shock
The Boer republics in South Africa (see the earlier section ‘Wider Still and Wider: Scrambling for Africa’ for the background to this section) found they were sitting on some of the world’s largest diamond mines. The British wanted them. Many British people went to work in the Boer republics, and the British government complained loudly that they weren’t allowed to vote, but lack of franchise was just an excuse really. In 1895 London and Cape Town secretly backed an illegal raid into the Transvaal led by a hot-headed adventurer called Dr Starr Jameson - the idea was to spark off a rising by the British settlers, but the Transvaal government got wind of the plan and arrested the raiders. London and Cape Town then desperately tried to deny they’d known anything about the plan. No one was convinced.
The Boers reckoned (probably rightly) that the British would launch a full-scale invasion, so they decided to attack first. In 1899 they invaded British territory. At the Battle of Spion Kop, they slaughtered the Highlanders; they cooped the Brits up at Mafeking, Ladysmith, and Kimberley; and they so trounced the Soldiers of the Queen that the attack was, as Kipling said, one hell of a lesson.
Ultimately, sheer weight of numbers (the British outnumbered the Boers) was bound to tell, but even when the British had taken all the Boer towns, the Boer commandos (guerrillas) took to the veldt and started guerrilla raids. General Kitchener then came up with the idea of concentration camps. The idea was to herd the entire Boer population together where they couldn’t hide or supply the commandos. Unfortunately, without proper water, sanitation, or food supplies thousands of people were bound to die in these camps, and they did. And not just white South Africans either, black camps existed, too. Yes, Britain won the Anglo-Boer War, but she won precious little credit for doing so. The great Imperial Dream was turning into a nightmare.