released 12 apr 06 / last mod 01 jun 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* During the last half of the 19th century, the British Empire continued to grow, obtaining new territories in Africa, and British power reached an absolute peak. Even as the British star continued to rise, however, there were signs that it was nearing the top of its arc.
* The restlessness in Jamaica meant very little to the British Empire; the island had long since ceased to be a major money-maker, and what happened there was of secondary importance. India, however, was a gold mine. It had always been a profitable source of fabrics and luxury goods, but in the middle of the 19th century British entrepreneurs decided to export the Industrial Revolution to India, building up manufacturing centers on a foundation of cheap native labor. By the late 1860s, Cawnpore had become the "Manchester of the East", an industrial boomtown.
Although modern views of the British Raj in India tend to be filtered through the glasses of Kipling and E.M. Forster, who focused on the government elite who ran the ICS, and the soldiers and small-time officials under them, in fact the majority of whites in India were businesspeople. While the ruling elite necessarily tended to reflect the view from London that Indians ought to be given a greater role in running their own country, the white business community was bitterly opposed to the idea, since it challenged their own supremacy.
This irritation came to the surface in 1880, when the Gladstone government appointed George Frederick Samuel Robinson, AKA Earl de Grey & Marquess of Ripon, to be Viceroy of India. He was solid liberal, and on discovering that Indian magistrates were not allowed to try white offenders, decided that this was not in the spirit of justice. He appointed one of his councilors, Courtenay Peregrine Ilbert, to come up with legislation that corrected the error.
Ripon had no idea that anyone would find such a notion particularly objectionable. Who could not see the simple justice of the idea? Besides, it only really affected about twenty Indian magistrates. That was Ripon's first mistake: he hadn't really got know the white business community in India and hadn't sounded them out on the issue. The Ilbert Bill was to go into effect in early 1883, but on 28 February of that year the white business community in Calcutta got together in the Town Hall and loudly denounced the idea in such terms as to suggest that the justice of the idea was not an issue to them. What was an issue was the very idea that an Indian, to these people a member of a born underclass, could be even conceived to be qualified to ever, under any circumstances, lay down the law to any white man. They said exactly as much in blunt and crude terms.
Ripon was shocked and admitted that he had been blindsided, but insisted that matters go ahead. He suggested, more than rightly in hindsight, that an India run by a small white elite solely for their own narrow self-interests, dealing contemptuously with a vastly larger native population who increasingly resented the insult of the arrangement, was not a working game over the long run.
That was all very far-sighted, but then Ripon made his second mistake: he failed to see that he had a real fight on his hands, and as per custom of Viceroys past, with the hot season approaching he and Ilbert went north to Simla. Ilbert thought, not too unreasonably, that if the hotheads simply let off steam for a while, the whole matter would bore itself to death. Since the white businessmen for the most part didn't have the luxury of going to the hills when the weather got oppressive, in reality they simply became angrier.
The result was what was called, with only some exaggeration, the "White Mutiny". The men of the white business community worked themselves into a frenzy, with the local press becoming thoroughly infected and fanning the flames to a wild pitch. Those familiar with modern "flame wars" on Internet message boards will be familiar with the way that accusations and counter-accusations fly back and forth, increasing in hysteria until both sides are making the most ridiculous statements. The White Mutiny was even louder and mostly one-sided, with the particular drift being that if brown judges were allowed to pass judgement on white people, all white women would be promptly raped. Exactly what reasoning, if any, was behind this belief is hard to say, and some suggest it was a manifestation of Victorian prudery. Probably it was simply the wildest thing the "mutineers" could think of. Ripon and Ilbert were also accused, almost as wildly, of inciting a race war, and the whole controversy spread back to Britain itself.
Ripon came back from the hills in December, to be greeted by cheering throngs of Indians. Whites were not cheering; they burned Ilbert in effigy. Ripon caved in, modifying the bill so that if a white person were tried by an Indian judge, the accused could insist on a jury trial, with half the jury English or American. Indians felt deeply insulted by the whole affair, as well they might, since the loud objections against the Ilbert Bill made it absolutely clear that much of the white overclass regarded Indians as inferior beings who were to be treated accordingly.
There is a saying that a man on the back of a horse may not give much thought to the fairness of their relationship -- but the horse can't avoid thinking about it a great deal. The accusation that Ripon was fomenting a race conflict ended up being a self-fulfilling prophecy. An ICS man named Allan Octavian Hume, who had been thoroughly revolted by the attacks on the Ilbert Bill, wanted to help set things right and so conceived the Indian National Congress, which met for the first time in 1885. Hume wanted the Congress to help reduce tensions, but instead it would become the source of modern Indian nationalism. Influential Indians such as Motilal Nehru and Janakinath Bose were prominent members. The sons of these two men would challenge British rule in India more directly.
* In the face of such initial sparks of Indian nationalism, the policy of British rule in India took a somewhat bizarre turn, contemplating an India where nationalist aspirations were to be satisfied by reviving, in a suitably Briticised form, traditional Indian aristocracies.
The prime mover in this exercise was George Nathaniel Curzon, who was
appointed Viceroy in 1898. Lord Curzon was of impeccable aristocratic
breeding, tracing his family tree back to the Norman Conquest. He was an
overachiever, going to the top of the class at Eton and Oxford, his star
rising just as rapidly in the House of Commons and in the India Office. He
was also impossibly arrogant and condescending, almost a cartoon caricature
of an elitist English aristocrat, and often seen as such even at the time:
My name is George Nathaniel Curzon,
I am a most superior person,
My cheek is pink, my hair is sleek,
I dine [with royalty] twice a week.
The vision Curzon and those who thought like him had for India was based on a
vision of a past Britain, where a responsible and benign aristocracy ran the
country for the good of the little people and in reverent obedience to the
Crown. India had its own traditional social aristocracy in the form of its
princes. Why not simply recreate them as a formal Indian ruling class? Of
course, formality was all it would be. British officials would really call
the shots and run things, the princes being nothing in practice but
figureheads.
Such a glorification of aristocracy was not by any means a new thing, Britain always having had a strong class consciousness, and the same sort of fondness for aristocracy, British or local, existed elsewhere in the Empire. Curzon was simply one of its strongest advocates. Instead of the "Orientalism" of the like of Warren Hastings, with its fascination with traditional Indian culture, Curzon and his kind were after a kind of "Tory-entalism", an India viewed through a filter of Tory nostalgia.
Tory-entalism is very hard to grasp from a modern point of view, particularly for Americans who have a traditional aversion to formal class distinctions (while still remaining prone to informal ones). Its form can be best explained by the Delhi Durbar of 1903, a monster bash thrown by Curzon to celebrate the accession to the crown of Edward VII. A photograph of the Durbar gives a flavor of the event, with long rows of soldiers and officials in their finery, flanking a parade of elephants carrying Indian aristocrats on their backs in plush finery. It had the sort of look that might be associated with an old silent movie spectacular.
Curzon bluntly rejected any proposal that Indians be given real power, and in fact he took actions to trim what power they had acquired. Most of the educated Indian caste that had been created by the British were Bengalis, and it was these "Bengali babus" that were making trouble for Curzon in the Indian National Congress. In 1905, he announced that Bengal would be divided in two, officially for administrative reasons, but in fact to raise obstacles to Indian nationalist attempts to organize. Curzon knew the decision would cause trouble, and it did, mostly in the form of organized boycotts, strikes, and public demonstrations.
However, the unrest also manifested itself in a series of terrorist attacks on British officials, leading to a bomb attack on a British judge on 30 April 1908 that misfired and killed two British women. There was a police crackdown, and investigators found out that the terrorists were not mere disaffected lowlife thugs, but prominent Bengali officials, the Indian elite. The investigation led to the arrest of 26 young men, all of them highly educated and of elite backgrounds. One, Aurobindo Ghose, had gone through the university system back in Britain and achieved stellar honors.
The 26 were put on trial in Alipore. The trial demonstrated the way the British mind was becoming more and more conflicted over colonialism. As mentioned earlier in this document, in some ways the British Empire was the "wrong empire", based on colonial dominance and not on the British system of rights and democracy. In fact, even the wrong empire couldn't shut out those ideals completely, and instead of a quick sham trial leading to swift executions, the Alipore trial dragged out for almost seven months. Aurobindo Ghose was acquitted, and even though the ringleader of the group, Aurobindo Ghose's brother Barendra Kumar Ghose, was sentenced to death, the sentence was later commuted.
The plan to partition Bengal was given up in 1911, but the British overlords had figured out a better way to reprimand the Bengali babus: the capital of British India was moved from Calcutta in Bengal to New Delhi, where a set of impressive Tory monuments to power were built, most particularly the spectacular Viceroy's Palace. Although Curzon himself would never reside in the palace, returning to Britain to reach a political peak when he was appointed Foreign Secretary in 1919, it was certainly something that fit his grand Tory-entalist vision.
Incidentally, Curzon had never thought much of Simla. In modern terms, he considered it something like a Disney resort for the common people. Curzon, to be sure, had a Disney sort of vision of his own, but it was on a much bigger scale and kept the common sort of people in their place.
Nationalists saw that the great structures of New Delhi were built from the sweat and treasure of Indians. That was true, but the statistics concerning the economic exploitation of India by the British give a very mixed story. Between 1868 and 1930, Britain only siphoned off about 1% of the yearly gross domestic product of India -- an order of magnitude less than the "take" in the Dutch colonies in the Dutch East Indies -- and the British invested massive sums into India in return. The rail network and factories have been mentioned, but under British rule the amount of irrigated land went from 5% to 25%. Medical innovations under British rule increased the average life expectancy of Indians 11 years.
Of course the average Indian was little richer under British rule than he or she had been before, and the British also presided over ghastly famines, in which vast numbers of Indians died while the administration fumbled matters. Still, it is hard to argue that Indians weren't better off under British rule than they would have been under rule by the Mughals or the other colonial powers. The British were, as a modern saying has it, "the best of the SOBs."
This leads to the real question, of course, of whether British rule of India was better than Indian rule of India. Indian nationalists certainly did not think so, though in a supreme irony on both sides of the conflict the nationalists were largely members of an educated elite that the British themselves had created. This question actually has no answer that does more than express a prejudice, and it would be rendered irrelevant by events anyway.
To a modern eye, there is something exasperating about George Nathaniel Curzon, with his undoubted excess of brainpower, so focused on a glorified vision of an aristocratic past to be oblivious to, at best, the ever-rising tide of native nationalism. Nonviolent and violent resistance to British rule, which only continued to increase, should have drawn his attention to this obvious fact. It is also clear in hindsight that he did not realize that with the coming of the twentieth century, the sun had set on the traditional aristocracies of the world and the clock was approaching midnight rapidly. Curzon looked back to a past that had never really existed, and forward to a future that, for better and for worse, would never exist at all.
* In 1880, most of Africa consisted of independent states. To be sure, there were colonial outposts here and there on the periphery, but for the most part the European powers had no great interest in the place. It was too remote; too primitive; too disease-ridden. However, once the land grab began, it went to completion with shocking swiftness. By 1900, most of the African continent was under European control, and by 1914 the only African states left that could be described as independent were Abyssinia and Liberia.
One of the key figures in this abrupt transformation was the son of a British clergyman, Cecil Rhodes, born in 1853, who emigrated to South Africa as a teenager, claiming later that he had been driven out of Britain by English cuisine. Whatever the actual reasons were, once in Africa he proved supremely ambitious. His first objective was to acquire control over the fabulously rich diamond fields at Kimberly. When Rhodes arrived, there were over a hundred small companies working the diamond mines there, with the result that competition kept them all weak. Any one element that managed to get ahead of the pack, for example by using outside financial backing, promised to gobble up all the smaller players at accelerating speed until they were all gone, leaving behind an effective and very profitable monopoly.
By 1888, all the companies had been consolidated into the De Beers Company, with Rhodes at the helm. He wasn't actually the owner of the company -- the Rothschild banking family was a much bigger shareholder than he was -- but given the success of his vision and his ability to sell his agenda to potential backers, there was no reason to object that he was in the driver's seat.
Diamonds were not the end of Rhodes' dreams. There were gold fields to the north, in Matabeleland, and Rhodes managed to push through a deal with the Matabele chief, Lobengula, to allow development of the fields, which was to go forward under the British South Africa Company, established by Rhodes in 1889. Rhodes handed Lobengula a lousy deal; the chieftain soon realized he'd been had, and decided to oppose the encroachment by force. Rhodes was perfectly willing to deal with Lobengula on those terms, and his Chartered Company Volunteers met the Matabele warriors at Shangani River in 1893. There were only 700 Volunteers to over 3,000 Matabele warriors, and the tribesmen were tough and courageous fighters. The end result was that 1,500 Matabele warriors were gunned down, to the loss of four Volunteers. It was all thanks to a newfangled invention -- the Maxim gun.
* The Maxim gun was the first truly successful modern machine gun. To be sure, operational machine guns had been around since the American Civil War, in the form of the Gatling gun, a multi-barreled contraption that was spun with a crank to shoot bullet after bullet out of its spinning barrels. It was, in full development, an effective weapon, and in fact modern American jet fighters use electrically-driven Gatlings that would be perfectly familiar in most details to the creator of the line, Dr. Richard Gatling. Gatlings were, however, on the large and cumbersome side, fine for mounting on a warship or setting up in a fortification; not so good for toting around on a rapidly shifting battlefield.
America benefited from the talents of many Britons who came to the New World, but to an extent the trade went both ways. An American named Hiram Maxim went to Europe to seek his fortune, and came up with an idea for building a machine gun that would operate by using the force of recoil to reload and fire a stream of bullets. The result was a highly effective weapon that was relatively lightweight and easy to use, much better suited to the field environment than the Gatling. Maxim used it to establish his fortunes -- partly with Rothschild backing -- and as a British citizen he became Sir Hiram Maxim, a prominent figure in the British scientific and technical establishment.
The Maxim gun would be built in other countries, including Germany and Russia, and as the slightly improved Vickers-Maxim gun it would be a standard British Army weapon until after the Second World War, not that much changed from its original configuration. The Maxim gun used at Shangani River fired 11.4 millimeter (0.45 caliber) bullets at a rate of 500 rounds per minute, with a water cooling jacket allowing it effectively to be fired for as long as its crew fed it belts of ammunition. It was toted around the countryside on its horse-drawn two-wheeled carriage,
Shangani River was the first time the weapon had been used in battle, and it
proved everything expected of it. The Volunteers sang a hymn to it, with a
series of verses along the lines:
Onward Chartered Soldiers, on to heathen lands,
Prayer books in your pockets, rifles in your hands.
Take the glorious tidings where trade can be done,
Spread the peaceful gospel -- with the Maxim gun.
Rhodes himself was just as blatant: now under his control, Matabeleland got
a new name: Rhodesia. He still wasn't satisfied, however. Taking a map of
Africa, he drew the path for a railway that would run "from Cape to Cairo",
snug in British-dominated territory all the way. Rhodes was a
super-imperialist, with dreams that dwarfed those of the likes of Clive and
with far more capability to back them up. He even toyed with the idea that
someday, somehow, America would return to the fold of the British Empire.
* Rhodes was probably the most ambitious Briton with an eye on Africa, but he wasn't the only one. George Goldie went to West Africa in 1875 to handle family business difficulties, decided that there were opportunities to make something of himself in the region, and in 1893 managed to get backing to establish the "Royal Niger Company" that was basically oriented towards another land grab, this one around the Niger River. He only had 500 men -- but they had Maxim guns.
By 1900, Goldie's conquests, now designated Northern Nigeria, were made a Crown protectorate. The Royal Niger Company had done the dirty work and made their profits, but now that the dust had settled the British government needed to bring the new colony under more regular control. The colony continued to grow, leading to a united Nigeria under British rule in 1912. British rule was solid but discreet, with the British actually running the whole show but delegating authority to local chieftains. As in India, few of the locals saw much change in their daily lives.
* Rhodes and Goldie were basically businessmen -- to be sure, businessmen who had machine guns and who didn't hesitate to use them, but still businessmen. However, the British government wasn't entirely standing by idly, instead waiting for the businessmen to get their own way and then moving in to establish proper authority. The British government had imperialist ambitions of its own in Egypt.
The French had been interested in North Africa before the British. Napoleon Bonaparte had started the trend in the 1790s with his ill-fated invasion of Egypt. That came to ruin at the hands of the Royal Navy at Aboukir in 1798, but after Napolean's fall the French came back to North Africa again, invading Algeria in 1830. By 1837 they had taken control of the country from the Ottoman Turks. They also became involved in Egypt, backing the modernizing governor Mehmet Ali and investing in the country, most significantly by pushing through the construction of the Suez Canal, which opened in 1869. They also pushed through investments in Turkey.
The Suez Canal made communications between Britain and her Asian colonies, particularly India, much simpler, and so control of the canal was a matter of strategic importance to Britain. The fact that it was effectively under French domination was a bother. In the previous decades, Britain had been able to extract concessions diplomatically through conferences of the five Great Powers of Europe, the other four being France, Prussia, Austria, and Russia. However, when the governments of Egypt and Turkey went broke in 1874, Britain chose much more unilateral action, buying up 44% of Suez Canal shares from the Khedive of Egypt for four million pounds. British Prime Minister Disraeli got the backing for the deal from, of course, the house of Rothschild.
Disraeli was pilloried by the opposition under his rival Gladstone for the deal, but even though there were strings attached on the authority granted by the shares, it did give Britain considerable leverage in how the canal was run. It would also prove to be a highly profitable deal. The French were not happy with the British moving in on them, but the deal was perfectly legitimate and above-board. The British understood French sensitivities and were inclined to tread softly, helping to set up a cozy arrangement where Britain, France, and Italy more or less ran things in Egypt. The British had always understood that half a loaf was vastly better than none, and the French were the sort of people who were willing to make a deal.
The arrangement might have been cozy for the three European powers, but it was a humiliation for Egyptians. In 1879 the Khedive tried to cut foreigners out of the running of his government. The French responded by throwing him out and installing his more agreeable son Tewfiq. The Egyptian military under Arabi Pasha threw out Tewfiq in turn and tossed down the gauntlet to the Europeans, fortifying Alexandria and damming the canal. The Egyptians made noises about cancelling their foreign debt and the lives of tens of thousands of Europeans living in Egypt seemed to be at risk.
Gladstone was now prime minister; he had bitterly criticized Disraeli's policies in Egypt, but now that he was in power, Gladstone felt the need to support the status quo, by force if need be. He didn't want to cut the French out of the loop, but the French government was paralyzed by a political crisis at the time and Britain had to go it alone. On 31 July 1882, Gladstone decided to send in the Royal Navy and the troops. On 13 September 1882, a relatively small force under General Sir Garnet Wolseley smashed Arabi Pasha and his army at Tel-el-Kebir. Arabi was shipped off to Ceylon. The British declared that their occupation of Egypt was strictly temporary, but "temporary" is a relative concept, and they would continue to declare it temporary for decades to come.
* The British occupation of Egypt got the attention of the other European powers. Once the British had showed their hand and started grabbing a piece of Africa, everybody else had to jump in and grab their own piece or end up empty-handed. Belgian King Leopold II had been probing the Congo for exploitation since 1876. The Italians seized Tripoli (now Libya) and tried to grab Abyssinia, only to be defeated and forced to settle for part of Somalia.
It was German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck who really set off the race for Africa, though his motives were less the attractions of property gains in a distant land than in promoting his government to the voters and playing Britain and France off against each other. In 1884 he established German claims to various African properties, including Tanganyika, Cameroon, Togo, and what is now Namibia. In late 1884 and early 1885 he hosted an international conference that was officially focused on freedom of trade and navigation in Africa. What the conference amounted to was something like a meeting of gangsters trying to come up with an agreement on how to carve up turf, the turf in this case being Africa. Of course, no African rulers were invited or consulted. The conference set the land grab into full motion like the shot from a starting gun. When fraud and robbery did not work, visits from European warships or the preaching of the Maxim gun quickly overwhelmed local resistance.
By 1900, as mentioned, the conquests were effectively complete. Portugal, Italy, and Spain had their footholds in the continent, while the Congo had literally become Leopold II's personal possession. Germany had carved out its chunks of empire, though German colonies in Africa were well outmatched in turn by French domination of West Africa. The British were the biggest winners of all, having mostly established their Cape-to-Cairo corridor, broken only by German East Africa in midspan. Not too surprisingly, France and Britain were often at odds in Africa, just as Bismarck had planned.
* The whole thing was entirely cynical and there were those who were thoroughly aware of it at the time. Herbert George Wells, a imaginative British author and a lifelong radical of sorts, wrote a novel in 1898 titled THE WAR OF THE WORLDS, concerning an invasion of the Earth by octopus-like Martians. It was a tidy, exciting thriller that remains very readable, being made into movies even in the 21st century, and was the template for "invasion of Earth" science-fiction stories into the present day.
The fact that the novel had a blackly ironic satirical context is now generally forgotten. The Martians, with their tripod walking war machines, death rays, and dark-fog poison gases, were nothing more than analogues of European imperialists, with their Maxim guns and other weapons. The invaders from another planet crushed and humiliated the great European powers as indifferently as if they were insects, just as those powers had crushed and humiliated lesser powers elsewhere on Earth. The only thing that saved the day from the blood-sucking Martians was the fact that the invaders had absolutely no resistance to Earthly diseases.
Although the white invaders of Africa often suffered from tropical diseases, it didn't stop them. To be sure, many black Africans went on with their lives with little change under new masters, and there were those who argued that they benefited from European know-how and technology. The Africans would discover there were drawbacks as well.
* The British had been energetic in expanding their empire in Africa. They hadn't been idle elsewhere, snapping up bits of Southeast Asia and chains of Pacific islands, such as the Solomons. By 1909, Britain controlled 25% of the world's land area -- three times more than France, ten times more than Germany.
The simple statistic of land area understates British influence. In 1914, the value of British investments abroad was estimated at 3.8 billion pounds, twice as much as French foreign investment, three times as much as German. Only about 1.8 billion of this went to British colonies. Britain invested more in the United States from 1865 to 1914 than was invested at home; if the British couldn't bring America back into the Empire, they could at least establish stock options on it. British investments in places like Brazil and Argentina gave Britain great influence over these countries, and of course almost everybody wanted to sign profitable trade agreements with such an economic powerhouse.
As mentioned before, the iron fist wasn't the British way, and the military forces required to maintain this huge empire were surprisingly modest. In 1898, the British Army and Royal Navy combined only had about 493,000 men in their ranks, and the defense budget was only about 40 million pounds. Even when Britain committed to the construction of dreadnought battleships after the turn of the century, the Royal Navy was able to obtain 27 of them between 1906 and 1913 for only 49 million pounds.
Many Britons of power and influence worried that their empire might crumble and disintegrate, and pushed a tighter federal union with ex-colonies such as Australia and Canada to brace up the structure. The idea was more smoke than fire. Australians and Canadians, though loyal to the home country, were not enthusiastic about giving back authority to Britain. Exactly what role brown-skinned India, the jewel in the crown, could play in such a "more perfect union" was puzzling.
The most troublesome part of the scheme, however, was Ireland, where the British could not overcome their prejudices against blacklegged Catholic Irishmen and were very reluctant to let Ireland off a short leash. The consequences of this attitude were predictable. The Catholic Irish had never liked English intrusion. The disastrous Irish potato blight and famine of the 1840s had killed about a million Irish and driven vast numbers out of the land; to be sure, the blight itself was not made in London, but Westminster and Whitehall had reacted to the tragedy with icy indifference, doing nothing much to relieve the vast suffering. There was an uprising in Ireland in 1867; it was crushed. Irish nationalists turned to terrorism. Parliamentary attempts to devolve authority to the Irish were cut short, ensuring that terrorism would continue.
Still, the whole notion of a more tightly-knit British Empire remained popular in Britain, both to the politicians and to the people on the street. The odd thing was that it isn't clear today that the people on the street got much economic benefit out of the empire. British citizens had to pay relatively high taxes to support the government and military infrastructure of the Empire, and though the British economy benefited from having sources of raw materials and markets for British goods, trade agreements arguably could have accomplished about as much without as much overhead.
Whether the British workingman was actually economically better off because of the British Empire might have been ambiguous. However, it was clear that the said workingman felt a sense of shared power that was exhilirating. The public thrived on stories of British imperial adventures, both in popular novels and newspaper headlines, and loved waving the Union Jack. Colonial military operations were regarded as something like popular sports events, with the crowd cheering on the home team. Real sporting matches were just as popular, with colonial rugby and particularly cricket teams competing with British teams, and the results were followed carefully in the papers. It was all terribly manly and romantic.
There was an ugly undercurrent to this patriotism. If white Britons dominated brown and black people elsewhere, it was of course evidence that whites were a superior race, and there were learned men who put forth racial theories that claimed this superiority was established in scientific fact. Hadn't Charles Darwin established that in the evolutionary contest, survival went to the fittest? Since Britain was so successful, obviously the British were the most fit and by definition superior. They called the philosophy "Social Darwinism", but it was merely dressing up a much older set of ideas in pseudo-scientific clothes: might makes right; the strong are inherently entitled to dominate the weak.
There was also the sly joke in that the male-dominated culture of empire and colonialism contained a streak of homoeroticism: for the most part suppressed and arguable as to its extent, but in some cases wildly, even comically blatant. Straightlaced Victorian Britain was not a good place for homosexuals, but colonial military outposts gave such folk all the opportunity for the wildest sexual adventures they could ever want. Of course, that sort of thing usually didn't make the papers.
* If there were Britons who believed that empire had granted them superiority, they got no better demonstration of it than the Battle of Omdurman in the Sudan, on 2 September 1898.
The British land grab in Africa had not gone completely unopposed, and opposition to the British included something that would be perfectly familiar a century later: Islamic fundamentalism. In the early 1880s, a Sudanese religious zealot declared himself the "Mahdi", the "Expected Guide", last of the twelve great "imams" or teachers. The self-declared Mahdi was an advocate of the strict Wahabinist flavor of Islam and managed to create a large army of followers, the "dervishes". In 1883, the dervishes exterminated 10,000 Egyptian troops led by Colonel William Hicks, previously of the British Army. There was a fuss in the papers back in Britain, and Gladstone's government duly dispatched General Charles George Gordon to take matters in hand.
Why Gordon was sent was a bit of a puzzle. Many people in authority had doubts about him, since he was a religious extremist and seemed to be slightly bonkers. He was ordered to help with the withdrawal of Egyptian troops from Khartoum, but when he arrived there in early 1884 he did much to validate the doubters by insisting the place be held. After almost a year of siege, the Mahdi's dervishes overran the defenses and chopped Gordon to pieces. The result was a terrific outrage in Britain. Gladstone had occupied Egypt only reluctantly; he was even more reluctant to occupy the Sudan. The prime minister had waited for months to send off a relief force under Woseley, and the troops arrived three days too late. The papers called Gladstone a murderer.
Still, nothing much was done about it until 1898, when a combined British and Egyptian force invaded the Sudan. They were under the command of General Herbert Horatio Kitchener, who had been a junior officer in Woseley's unsuccessful relief force. Kitchener was a professional soldier with a iron military bearing, though those who knew him well observed some softer hidden inclinations, such as a love of flower arrangement and interior decorating, and even a well-concealed dry sense of humor. Kitchener was rather devout himself and had been something of an admirer of Gordon. The Mahdi was dead by this time, but Kitchener still wanted to settle the score with the Khalifa, the Mahdi's son, and the dervishes.
The site where the two forces met was appropriate. Omdurman was at the confluence of the Blue and White Nile rivers and was a twin city to Khartoum on the other side of the river; the rematch would be on the old playing grounds. The Khalifa's forces numbered about 52,000, while Kitchener's numbered about 20,000. The dervishes even had some Maxim guns of their own, though they were in general not armed with modern weapons. Outgunned, their zealotry proved absolutely no match for the well-drilled invaders. The battle lasted five hours, and the dervishes were simply slaughtered. The water jackets of the Maxims were steaming and piles of spent cartridges stood beside them. Kitchener only lost 400 men, with only 48 killed.
It was a massive triumph of British arms. Kitchener would be known from then on as "Kitchener of Khartoum" or simply "K of K". It wasn't technically a completely accurate nickname, but "Kitchener of Omdurman" didn't have quite the same ring to it. The battle was celebrated in the British papers by the writings of a young war correspondent, 23-year-old Winston Churchill. Churchill, the son of a noble British family and a bright, pushy, energetic young man on the make, had a love of the British Empire right down to his bones, and played up the victory to the public.
Churchill was very far from stupid or imperceptive, however, and though he was a military romantic he was appalled by the mechanised slaughter at Omdurman. The dervishes had been recklessly brave; the only result was that the desert ended up carpeted with fly-ridden bloody bundles of meat and cloth. He was even more appalled to watch wounded dervishes being butchered, and to find that Kitchener had the Mahdi's tomb desecrated. Kitchener took the Mahdi's head with him in a kerosene can as a souvenir.
* The Maxim gun had made the victory possible, and indeed it had been one of the primary tools for Britain's conquests in Africa. However, the Maxim was obviously a weapon with an edge on both sides. When Hiram Maxim was a young man in Europe seeking his fortune, legend has it that an American acquaintance there told him: "If you want to make yourself rich, invent something that will enable these fool Europeans to kill each other more quickly."
Whether this was actually said or not, it would certainly prove hideously true in hindsight. The Maxim gun did make Maxim rich and famous; and there would come a time when both sides in a battle had Maxims and would know how to use it. The Maxim gun had done much to build up the British Empire. It would do as much or more to help tear it down.
* The Battle of Omdurman in the Sudan in 1898 was a high point of sorts of the British Empire. It didn't take long for the wind to shift.
Britain had come to dominate Southern Africa. The region was strategically important to the empire, a vital way station between the western and eastern halves of the domain. The earlier white settlers of the region, the Dutch Afrikaaners, the Boers, were independent-minded and didn't like British domination, all the more so because the British promoted (relatively) benign relations with the black peoples there. The Boers pulled up stakes and went north to establish the "Boer Republics" -- the "Orange Free State" and the "South African Republic".
The British found Boer independence irritating. They found it even more irritating when gold was discovered in the Boer Republics. The current British colonial secretary was Joe Chamberlain, a successful if somewhat eccentric Birmingham industrialist who had turned to politics, with a focus on unapologetic imperialism. The Crown's governor in South Africa, Alfred Milner, shared Chamberlain's imperialist inclinations, and together they drummed up a case for war against the Boers. They demanded that British settlers who had gone north to the Boer Republics -- the "Uitlanders" -- be given the right to vote after five years' residence. This was asking the Afrikaaners to politically slit their own throats, and when they predictably refused, the cry went up for military action.
The British got more military action than they bargained for. The Boers didn't wait for the British to build up forces and invade: they hit the British first, and by late 1899 had bottled up 12,000 British troops in the town of Ladysmith. The Boers had Maxim guns; German Mauser bolt-action rifles; breech-loading modern artillery including German Krupp "Long Tom" rifled guns -- and knew how to use them.
Just how well they knew how to use them was demonstrated at a hill named Spion Kop on 24 January 1900. The British commander in the region, General Sir Redvers Buller, ordered a force under Lieutenant General Sir Charles Warren to take his troops and crack Afrikaaner defenses there. The British crawled up the hill in the fog and dim morning night to drive away Boer sentries without much fuss. It all seemed easy -- too easy, in fact: when the fog burned off the British found they were essentially in a pocket rimmed by Boer Maxim guns and artillery. The British were slaughtered. Winston Churchill was there in his capacity as a war correspondent, writing later that the "dead and injured, smashed and broken by shells, littered the summit till it was a bloody reeking shambles." Now the bundles of cloth and meat were wearing British uniforms.
Spion Kop was a staggering upset defeat for Britain, one of the biggest since Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga, and there was no way to pretend otherwise. However, it was possible to divert attention from the fiasco, and the papers eagerly grabbed on to the Boer siege of British troops in a dusty little town of Mafeking to demonstrate the British stiff upper lip in the face of adversity.
There were 700 British troops to 7,000 Boers, with the British led by Colonel Robert Stephenson Smith Baden-Powell, AKA "Stephe". Baden-Powell was a cricket enthusiast and played up the siege as a cricket match, as did the newspapers. It was all very sporting and theatrical and the public found it so riveting that when Mafeking was relieved on 17 May 1900, after 217 days under siege, the public reaction was as if, a cynical observer noted, "they had defeated Napoleon." In reality, Mafeking was an incidental sideshow, and the papers did not take much notice of how Baden-Powell ruthlessly exploited the black population, for example taking away their rations to feed the whites. The hard-nosed Kitchener saw Baden-Powell for the toy soldier he was, "more outside show than sterling worth."
The important thing was that the British had rallied, reequipped, reorganized, and come back with a literal vengeance. Sir Redvers Buller -- who had been predictably nicknamed "Sir Reverse" -- was replaced by the more effective Lord Roberts, AKA "Bobs", and by summer it seemed that the British had all but won the war, having relieved Ladysmith and captured the key towns of Bloemfontein and Pretoria.
The Boers didn't feel like they were beaten, not by a long shot, and turned to guerrilla tactics, with Boer "commandos" performing hit-and-run attacks on British troops. Kitchener complained that their methods were distinctly unsporting, which might seem quaint and comical now -- except that K-of-K had a deadly valid point. A guerrilla force more or less hides in the civilian population, venturing out to attack the occupying force and then dashing back into hiding again. The problem is that the civilian population is left to the mercy of the occupying force. Guerrilla fighting dangerously blurs the line between combatant and noncombatant, and guerrilla tactics are usually based on bushwhacking and acts of terror. If the guerrillas aren't playing by the rules, then the temptation for the occupying force to not play by the rules and take action against defenseless civilians becomes overwhelming.
The British quickly gave in to the temptation. Tens of thousands of Boer homes were put to the torch. Those dispossessed by such tactics -- for the most part the wives and children of Boer commandos hiding out in the brush -- were penned up with another modern invention, barbed wire, into concentration camps. The camp system was not well planned and not well implemented, and the result that thousands of Boer civilians died of malnutrition and disease.
The commandos fought on. Kitchener replaced Lord Roberts in November 1900 and began an aggressive program of pacification, setting up a network of blockhouses to control key points, and webs of barbed wire to restrict Boer movements. (A more modern approach would have also involved setting up vast minefields, but mines were not well-developed in those days and it wasn't practical to scatter them around like candy as is often done now.) This was a brute-force, time-consuming process, and in the meantime Boer women and children continued to die in the concentration camps.
News of this tragedy did get back to Britain, attracting the attention of Emily Hobhouse, daughter of a clergyman. A picture of her shows a pretty, round-face woman with a long neck and a soft, feminine appearance, but appearances were a bit misleading as she had, in her own way, as much steely resolve as K-of-K. She arrived in Cape Town in December 1900 to investigate, and investigate she did, overcoming obstacles that Kitchener put in her path. She found the concentration camps to be every bit the filthy pestholes they had been rumored to be.
Hobhouse went back to Britain and pressed the War Office on the matter. The War Office unsurprisingly judged her an obnoxious do-gooder and was obstructive. Hobhouse pressed the government as well, and so the government did the predictable and logical thing: they set up a committee, all women, under Millicent Fawcett, to investigate and submit recommendations. Hobhouse was pointedly excluded. She angrily returned to South Africa, but the authorities there refused to even let her get off the ship, and all she could do was go back home, even more angry.
However, her efforts had paid off. The Fawcett Commission not only submitted a perfectly scathing report on the matter, the government took it to heart and set about implementing reforms. Even Chamberlain and Milner were shocked by the situation, with Milner admitting that the criticisms were "not without some foundation." Conditions in the camps began to improve rapidly.
The ugly business of the camps had led to a lot of bad publicity against the British government around the world, and the Liberal Party used the issue as a lever against the Tory Imperialists who had dominated the government for decades. The Boer War, so the script went, was a ruthless campaign of extermination conducted for the benefit of a clique of the super-rich at the expense of the British taxpayer and over the bodies of British soldiers.
This rhetoric has a certain modern sound to it; the Left's distaste for capitalism leads to a strong inclination to see all wars in terms of economic rationales -- which, it can be argued, aren't always bad rationales -- while ignoring the fact that wars are also conducted for strategic, moral, and emotional rationales -- which, all but unarguably, aren't always good ones. The rhetoric of the Liberals against Tory Imperialism also had a nasty undercurrent of anti-Semitism, since the most prominent of what would now be called "fat cats" perceived as responsible for imperialism were the Rothschilds, leading some to suspect a diabolical conspiracy of Jewish financiers. The Liberals did have a point, though: there were overly cozy relationships between the business and ruling elites -- also something that has a modern sound to it, but in some cases the relationships in those days were of the sort that would cause a public outcry now.
* While all this fuss was in progress, the Boer War ground on towards its end. Kitchener's plodding and ruthless pacification campaign finally got the Boer commandos by the throat, and the Afrikaaners had to sue for peace, resulting in the Treaty of Verreninging, signed on 31 May 1902, which effectively absorbed the Boer Republics into the British Empire. The Boers had lost the war, but as it turned out they had won the peace. Britain had to pay for reconstruction of the homelands, and the Boers were granted considerable autonomy. Furthermore, when the Union of South Africa was created in 1910, it was Boer-dominated. In effect, the Afrikaaners politically conquered the English-speaking whites of South Africa, implementing along the way a white-supremacist "apartheid" regime that made the rest of the British Empire look positively egalitarian in comparison.
The Tory government that had pushed the war in Africa had been mortally wounded by it, with the Liberals throwing them out of office in a landslide in January 1906. However, with the end of the conflict to the south, the British government was now faced with a potentially much bigger and uglier conflict closer to home. The Boer War had underlined the potential for mass slaughter with modern weapons and what could be done to helpless civilians with barbed wire. It was only a taste of things to come.