THE ORIGINS OF THE EMPIRE
By IL V. HODSON "Not by treaties or agreements, but exclusively by force, Great Britain built up a vast Empire."
WHOSE are the words of Adolf Hitler, and there is much reason to think that he really believes them. His complete misunderstanding of the British Empire—not only the mind and temper of the British people, but the plain facts of Empire history—has been a disaster for the world. Had he not been obsessed by the idea of force as the foundation of empire, he might not have placed so much faith in it as the sole measure and instrument of German greatness. Had he not believed that the British Empire was built by force, and that the force had now wasted away, he might have thought again before challenging a combination of peoples whose moral and material strength he is only just beginning to realise.
If ever again he is pent in a fortress, his prison library ought certainly to include the massive volumes of the Cambridge Hiitoly of the British Empire, of which the latest has just been. published. This new volume, covering the period 1783-187o,* is not, of course, a complete answer to the Nazi lies about the origins of the Empire ; for it leaves behind the turbulent period of the sixteenth, seventeenth and much of the eighteenth centuries, when wars in Europe were remaking the maps of the wider world, and when Britain gained her foothold in the East ; and it stops short of the boom period of competition for African colonies in the 'nineties, and of the South African War, that locus classicus of the anti-imperialists. It omits, too, the whole story of India, which is dealt with elsewhere in the series. Yet in a way it furnishes the best of answers to the lies ; for it covers the most constructive century in the history of the British Empire, a century during which a world-wide commonwealth emerged from an assortment of scattered outposts, and convict settlements grew into nations ; a century of growth through the labours of missionaries, explorers, traders and statesmen, rather than soldiers and swashbucklers—of building by " treaties and agreements," not by force. The nineteenth century in imperial history was a golden age of piety and profit, progress and peace: the cradle- days of the British Commonwealth of Nations.
There, was, indeed, in the period of this volume, one long phase of international violence which did much to form the geographical shape, and something to form the policy and thought, of the modern British Empire. That was the period of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. The parallel with the present war is vividly obvious—a fact from which no one has more to learn than Hitler. For Napoleon was one of the great founders of the British Empire. His ambition to conquer Europe and become master of the world called forth the epic struggle between his military might and the sea-power of Britain. The outcome was to confirm British sea-power, which has ever since remained the strength and stay of the Empire, to bring new territories under the British Crown, and to set the imperial history of the nineteenth century on a fresh course of peaceful expansion and prosperous liberalism.
Two densely packed chapters on the conflicts with revolu- tionary France and Napoleon are contributed by Dr. J. Holland Rose. They are significantly followed by chapters on the New Imperial System, of experiment with colonial self-government under the anxious eye of metropolitan humanitarianism, by Professor Harlow, and on the Abolition of the Slave Trade— that touchstone of African and West Indian history for a
*Cambridge University Press. 5os.
generation—by Professor Coupland. The landmarks upon the broad vista of imperial history that was opened by the Treaty of Vienna are not wars and conquests but such events as emancipation, the Durham report, the repeal of the Naviga- tion Acts, of the Corn Laws and the sugar preference, the exploration of the Niger or the projection of the Suez Canal. Look down the list of chapters in this volume of the Cambridge History: Colonial Self-Government, the Emancipation of the Slaves, the Movement towards Free Trade, Problems of Settle- ment, the Development of the Crown Colonies, the Routes to the East, the Exploration of Africa—such titles, over the names of eminent social and political historians, far outnumber the accounts of conflict by the chroniclers of war and the grimmer forms of diplomacy. One chapter on Imperial Defence is a tale of chronic indifference and disrepair.
It was not, of course, a golden age for everyone, nor an era without faults and violence. The West Indies have never recovered from the blows delivered at their economy by humanitarian and liberal reform. Their claim to sympathy and help today is founded, not on cruelties and injustices meted out to them by past exponents of force, but on the high pro- portion of the bill that they had to meet for the advancement of justice and humanity at large. This book is a history, not a propagandist tract, and it records with equal faithfulness the good and the evil. Mr. Fay's notable chapter on the early free-trade movement, for instance, contains an analysis, un- mixed with whitewash, of the Far Eastern trading system that led to the Opium War of 1839-42, one of the less creditable occasions on which the flag (or rather flags, for Britain was not alone involved among the European Powers) has followed trade. Yet there is a credit side even to that account. Because Hong- kong, a prize of the Opium War, was allowed by British mercantile liberalism to become a great free entrepot for the China trade, where commerce, finance and industry could flourish unhindered by the internal unrest of China or the restrictions of an archaic system of government, it has proved in the end a boon and not a scourge to the Chinese people.
Mr. Fay's chapter is one of the keys to the whole story. For it was an economic age, and political developments—even such inherently revolutionary changes as the 1867 Constitution of Canada—can be understood only if viewed against their economic background. The American Revolution had decisively overthrown the notion that colonial peoples, nursed in British freedom, could be coerced in their own affairs by British Imperial rule ; it had also overthrown the concept of an empire as a close preserve for Imperial commerce and shipping. Out of the political disillusionment grew the positive doctrine of Dominion Status ; out of the economic disillusionment grew the adoption of free trade as a positive instrument of world progress. It was in this era, not in one of protection and preference, that the countries that are now Dominions grew to national manhood in wealth and population, and the British trader, with his products of Manchester and Birmingham and Sheffield, penetrated into the dark recesses of Africa and Asia. It was a policy that suited the newly-developed countries, eager for cheap manufactures and wide markets for their produce, as it suited Great Britain herself ; whether it was helpful to the older British colonies such as the West Indies and Ceylon, or to India, is more doubtful. One thing at least is clear: that it was of immense value to the world at large, for it meant that British maritime and Imperial power guaranteed to the crowded countries of Europe equal access to the newly opened riches and the rapidly expanding markets of the overseas world, and peaceful Lebensraum for their emigrant peoples.
No one could read this worthy volume in a great work without wondering how it is that the romance of our Imperial history is so little known among the generality of our own people. If we do not appreciate it ourselves, we can hardly expect it to be familiar to the foreign world or even to Hitler and Mussolini. There is in this volume a chapter by Mr. Heawood on African exploration which could yield a score of true tales to thrill every healthy schoolboy. Great debts are owed by Africa and the world to the daring and endurance of Mungo Park, of Clapperton, of Speke, of Living- stone and a dozen more. Yet what could the average educated man in Britain or the Dominions tell you of their lives and discoveries? Recently we celebrated the centenary of Livingstone's first expedition, the occasion being marked by admirable speeches by Lord Lloyd and Lord Cranborne, and by other suitable oratory at select gatherings. By the general public, however, it pasted almost unnoticed; for to them the great explorer is little more than a drab missionary in a dog-collar, and the object of Stanley's famous wise-crack. It is a bad period of our social history that has made the Empire's story seem either dull or discreditable. " Peace is not news," is an old Fleet Street adage, and many of the most creditable chapters in that story have been made to appear the dullest. Will the cinema come to the rescue, and humanise the State Papers and the statistical tables? It has given us Clive, after its fashion: can it give us Raffles and Grey, the Earl of Durham and Edward Gibbon Wakefield? Can it show to the world in the ninepenny seats, as plainly as the historians prove to the student, that Hitler lies about the British Empire, and that where he breathes abuse we ought to fill with pride?
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