Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism 9780755624140, 9781780768564

Citation preview

Trim: 156mm × 234mm Top: 52pt Gutter: 60pt Visual Culture Royal 234 × 156 July 28, 2015 22:9

P1: KpB IBBK121-FM

MAPS xv

I. European Advance in Central Africa

xvi

II. Progress of the Delimitation of British Frontiers in Africa III. European Advance into North-East Africa

xviii

IV. European Advance into West Africa

380

ABBREVIATIONS OF TITLES OF WORKS AND SOURCES QUOTED IN THIS VOLUME A.E. A.E.F. A.E.M.D.

´ Archives du Minist`ere des Affaires Etrang` eres, Paris. ´ Archives du Gouvernement-G´en´eral, Afrique Equatoriale Franc¸aise, Brazzaville. ´ Archives du Minist`ere des Affaires Etrang` eres, M´emoires et Documents.

B.D.

British Documents on the Origins of the Way, 1898– 1914.

B.M. Add. MSS.

British Museum, Additional Manuscripts.

C.O.

Colonial Office Records, Public Record Office, London.

D.D.F.

Documents diplomatiques franc¸ais, 1st series.

D.D.I.

Documenti diplomatici italiani.

F.O.

Foreign Office Records, Public Record Office, London.

Grosse Politik

Die Grosse Politik der Europ¨aischen Kabinette, 1871– 1914.

Hansard

Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates.

M.F.O.M.

Archives du Minist`ere de la France d’Outre Mer, Paris.

P.P.

Parliamentary Papers.

P.R.O.

Public Record Office, London.

Q.V.L.

Letters of Queen Victoria, edited by G. E. Buckle.

S.P.

Private Papers of Robert, Third Marquess of Salisbury, Christ Church, Oxford.

Trim: 156mm × 234mm Top: 52pt Gutter: 60pt Visual Culture Royal 234 × 156 July 28, 2015 22:9

P1: KpB IBBK121-FM

MAPS xv

I. European Advance in Central Africa

xvi

II. Progress of the Delimitation of British Frontiers in Africa III. European Advance into North-East Africa

xviii

IV. European Advance into West Africa

380

ABBREVIATIONS OF TITLES OF WORKS AND SOURCES QUOTED IN THIS VOLUME A.E. A.E.F. A.E.M.D.

´ Archives du Minist`ere des Affaires Etrang` eres, Paris. ´ Archives du Gouvernement-G´en´eral, Afrique Equatoriale Franc¸aise, Brazzaville. ´ Archives du Minist`ere des Affaires Etrang` eres, M´emoires et Documents.

B.D.

British Documents on the Origins of the Way, 1898– 1914.

B.M. Add. MSS.

British Museum, Additional Manuscripts.

C.O.

Colonial Office Records, Public Record Office, London.

D.D.F.

Documents diplomatiques franc¸ais, 1st series.

D.D.I.

Documenti diplomatici italiani.

F.O.

Foreign Office Records, Public Record Office, London.

Grosse Politik

Die Grosse Politik der Europ¨aischen Kabinette, 1871– 1914.

Hansard

Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates.

M.F.O.M.

Archives du Minist`ere de la France d’Outre Mer, Paris.

P.P.

Parliamentary Papers.

P.R.O.

Public Record Office, London.

Q.V.L.

Letters of Queen Victoria, edited by G. E. Buckle.

S.P.

Private Papers of Robert, Third Marquess of Salisbury, Christ Church, Oxford.

P1: KpB IBBK121-FM

Trim: 156mm × 234mm Top: 52pt Gutter: 60pt Visual Culture Royal 234 × 156 July 24, 2015 10:1

FOREWORD A truly good book needs no introduction. First published in 1961, Africa and the Victorians has stood the test of time as the classic account of the partition of Africa in the late nineteenth century. Part of the reason for its appeal to the general reader is the engaging, epigrammatic style, which sustains a narrative spanning one-third of a century, roughly from the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 to the beginning of the Anglo-Boer War three decades later. Despite the book’s clarity, a few comments may help elucidate its historical significance. Previously, historians saw a fundamental break between the anti-imperial mid-Victorian outlook and the enthusiasm for colonial expansion in the nineteenth century’s last three decades. Robinson and Gallagher held, to the contrary, that there was a basic continuity of imperial expansion throughout the nineteenth century. The late Victorians were no more anxious ‘to rule over African jungle and bush’ than had been their predecessors. The authors made clear why things nonetheless changed, thereby obliquely commenting on the process of change itself both within government circles and the world at large. Victorian politicians, whether Liberal or Conservative, and permanent officials, whether in the Colonial Office or Foreign Office, dealt in Africa with countries they had never seen. But they made confident judgments. Members of British Cabinets represented fluctuating political coalitions. They always bore in mind the temperament of the House of Commons, which often revealed tension among factions ranging from diehard Conservatives to those on the Radical left. Within the Cabinet, an ever-shifting elite orchestrated the direction and nuances of policy. Prime Ministers, Foreign Secretaries and Colonial Secretaries alike usually dealt with more than one issue at the same time, for example, Ireland as well as Egypt. They embraced aristocratic traditions of duty to the nation while taking a contemptuous view of businessmen, philanthropists and the ignorant populace. Consciously or not, they shared assumptions about international legality as well as codes of honour. As the authors put it: ‘Policy was made at “house parties”, not by the man in the street or the man in the Stock Exchange.’ Africa and the Victorians is not only a history of late-Victorian expansion. It is also a study of significant decisions as

P1: KpB IBBK121-FM

viii

Trim: 156mm × 234mm Top: 52pt Gutter: 60pt Visual Culture Royal 234 × 156 July 24, 2015 10:1

FOREWORD

seen through policymakers’ own eyes and in their thoughts. Robinson and Gallagher, in short, look at the political system from the inside out. Uppermost in the minds of Victorian politicians was the protection of India, the source of British power in the Eastern hemisphere. To them and their permanent officials, the British Isles and India were the two centres of wealth, prosperity and military strength. Yet in the late nineteenth century, the British experienced a virtual revolution in their relationship with Africa. Contrary to popular and scholarly belief, the reasons were more strategic than economic: ‘They moved into Africa, not to build a new African empire, but to protect the old empire in India.’ They had to take into account a changing world of telegraphs, fast trains and steamships, along with the continuing need for coal and cotton. Those themes are often implicit in Robinson and Gallagher’s account, but they are also occasionally bold and imaginatively explicit as well. This is a book with two lucid and closely reasoned arguments. The first deals with the British occupation of Egypt, the point of no return in the empire’s worldwide expansion; and the second, which states the book’s method as well as its aims, embraces the concept of the ‘official’ or collective mind of government. Not least, the two authors make clear unspoken assumptions about indirect dominance and direct colonial rule. The Egyptian argument appears and reappears, in unyielding historical interpretation. Even at the end of the book, the point never vanishes, rather like the smile of the Cheshire cat: ‘The occupation of Egypt sparked the Scramble for Africa’: those few words assert Egyptian cause and worldwide effect reaching as far as Kaiser Wilhelmsland (as New Guinea was designated at the time). Until the publication of Africa and the Victorians, historical consensus held that the beginning of the ‘Scramble’ could be precisely located in Germany’s entry into the race for colonies in Africa and the Pacific in 1884–85 – the critical years in the creation of the German colonial empire. Previous historians had identified at least three other principal causes: French economic penetration into western Africa; British support of Portuguese claims to Angola and Mozambique in return for Portuguese guarantees of free trade; and the creation of the Congo colony by Leopold II, King of the Belgians. King Leopold acted as a private entrepreneur, independently of the Belgian government. In one of the book’s remarkable pen portraits, he resembles John D. Rockefeller as much as or more than a European monarch. There was no direct Belgian connection with the Congo, yet the principle of Belgian neutrality helps explain the support King Leopold gained from the European powers in 1885. His proposal for a neutral ‘Congo Free State’ had the virtue, for the British at least, of keeping others out.

P1: KpB IBBK121-FM

Trim: 156mm × 234mm Top: 52pt Gutter: 60pt Visual Culture Royal 234 × 156 July 24, 2015 10:1

FOREWORD

ix

As the pages turn, the authors’ originality becomes ever more clear. They take into account indigenous reactions, from the nationalism of the Afrikaners to what Robinson and Gallagher originally called the ‘pseudonationalism’ of the Egyptians. As they investigated the nature of the Egyptian response, the military leader Arabi Pasha appeared more and more to be the spearhead of nationalist reaction. They originally respected the judgment of William Ewart Gladstone, the Prime Minister, and Lord Granville, the Foreign Secretary, who blamed Arabi for ‘anarchy’ and antiWestern sentiment in Egypt. Yet the more Robinson and Gallagher studied the case, the more Arabi Pasha bore a resemblance to Gamal Abdel Nasser of some seventy-five years later. Works by historians usually reflect their own times. Africa and the Victorians was written during and immediately after the Suez crisis of 1956. The Gladstone Cabinet believed that a naval demonstration would intimidate the Egyptians and remove the danger to the Suez Canal. Yet Gladstone’s own thought was muddled. The ‘People’s William’ was by then an old man who had lost his grip. In the words of one of his contemporaries, Sir Charles Dilke, in the Egyptian context he was ‘a magnificent lunatic’. Gladstone continued to voice his own slogan, ‘Egypt for the Egyptians’, but he acquiesced in the decision to invade. The Cabinet collectively believed that the occupation would be temporary. British troops would be withdrawn as soon as order was restored. A short occupation would enable the Egyptians to manage their own affairs. There was nothing systematic or even rational about the British response to the Egyptian crisis. Robinson and Gallagher demonstrate the significance of British investment in the country and the need to keep on good terms with France in order not to jeopardize the French financial stake, which was larger than the British, both in Egypt and in the shares of the Suez Canal Company. The immediate response by the ‘men on the spot’ came from the Royal Navy. Admiral Frederick Beauchamp Seymour, Commanderin-Chief, Mediterranean Fleet, bombarded the Egyptian fortifications at Alexandria. Beauchamp Seymour usually acted with judicious and decisive initiative; but the Egyptian incident in 1882 demonstrated his response to ‘local provocation’. He probably exceeded his instructions. The critical action by a British naval officer thus foreshadowed the occupation of the Canal Zone three-quarters of a century later. The pen portraits of King Leopold, the Prime Ministers Gladstone and Lord Salisbury, and other protagonists, such as the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, distinguish the book. With Gladstone ‘chopping logic’ and Salisbury keeping ‘his own gin shop’, the pithy descriptions deftly convey psychological insight as well as the complexity of figures such as Sir

P1: KpB IBBK121-FM

x

Trim: 156mm × 234mm Top: 52pt Gutter: 60pt Visual Culture Royal 234 × 156 July 24, 2015 10:1

FOREWORD

Evelyn Baring (Lord Cromer) in Egypt, Sir George Goldie on the Niger, and Cecil Rhodes, who pressed claims in southern Africa extending to the Congo Free State. The interaction of those and other leading personalities gives vitality to Robinson and Gallagher’s account of such events as the occupation of Uganda and the confrontation with the French at Fashoda. *** The second dominant theme of the book is the ‘official mind’. At any particular time, there was departmental consensus as well as collective memory. ‘Cold rules of national safety’ were handed down from one generation to the next. In the Colonial Office, the memory system could recall precedents and single events going back to the war for American independence – itself especially significant because of the Colonial Office’s subsequent devolution of responsibility, which was designed in part to guard against such catastrophes in the future. In South Africa, it was hoped that the English-speaking peoples would form a federation – on the model of Canada – with the Afrikaner republics. The possibility of federation reflected the positive view, despite the racist edge of settler society. Negatively, the danger of Afrikaner nationalism always had to be kept in mind, always with the fear of creating another Ireland or even pushing the two sides to war. The outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War forms the last episode of the book, with Salisbury lamenting that the British had gone to war ‘for a people whom we despise and for territory which will bring no profit and no power to England’. Salisbury more than Gladstone directed his own foreign and colonial policy, though depending on tough-minded official expertise. Salisbury effectively managed the delegation of authority, the key mechanism in large departments of state or, for that matter, the empire itself. He relied on Sir Percy Anderson of the Foreign Office, who dealt with Africa competently and with a sharp eye on Britain’s rivals. Anderson had no doubt that ‘the French have a settled policy in Africa’: ‘And that policy is antagonistic to us. The progress of this policy is sometimes sluggish, sometimes feverish, but it never ceases.’ Anderson assured coherence of thought and action against the ruthlessly determined French. Following Salisbury’s instructions, the Foreign Office attempted to conciliate them by yielding, in Salisbury’s phrase, ‘light soils’ in western Africa. Salisbury aimed to strengthen Britain’s geopolitical claim to the backbone of the African continent. The ultimate purpose was to secure the headwaters of the Nile, thus protecting Egypt and thereby securing the critical passage to India through the Suez Canal. In his own words: ‘Whatever Power holds the Upper Nile Valley must, by the mere force of its geographical situation,

P1: KpB IBBK121-FM

Trim: 156mm × 234mm Top: 52pt Gutter: 60pt Visual Culture Royal 234 × 156 July 24, 2015 10:1

FOREWORD

xi

dominate Egypt.’ From the British perspective, the overriding goal during the Scramble for Africa remained the protection of India, even if it involved the occupation of Egypt. The gateways to India, one contemporary critic remarked, seemed to extend ever farther from India itself. To protect the existing empire in the East, the British were driven to strategic annexations that eventually expanded British power and lines of communication through the ‘Southern British World’ from the Cape to Cairo to Singapore. Unpredictable consequences and accidental mistakes often had to be dealt with at the local level, whether by a district officer, a consul, or an army or police official. In the case of the army officer and later proconsul Frederick Lugard, alliances with tribal chiefs became the principal way to extend and consolidate British rule. Robinson and Gallagher clearly establish two distinct and original categories that run through the book: ‘protonationalism’, as in the case of the early Egyptian nationalist movement; and ‘sub-imperialism’, as in the significance of the men on the spot – for example, Lugard – in shaping the fundamentals of British indirect rule. The essential component of the British imperial system was collaboration. Only by mutual agreement and cooperation with indigenous leaders – in India and throughout the world – could the British build an empire that stretched over one-fourth of the world’s surface and, in the case of India, held sway over some 300 million. Collaboration is the most contentious theme of the book. The counter-argument, put forward insistently by some historians of Africa at the time, held that resistance was the dominant African reaction to European intrusion. After the book’s publication, T.O. Ranger, for example, retorted that resistance rather than collaboration explained the continual response to alien rule. For Robinson and Gallagher, resistance movements were backward-looking and reactionary. For Ranger, they preserved memories of liberty and pride, thus shaping modern African nationalism. By contrast, Robinson and Gallagher consistently held that the word collaboration summed up the basis of British rule throughout the world. During the era of British expansion in the nineteenth century, there was a distinct sense of economic, cultural and moral superiority. In the view of the British themselves, British rule facilitated ‘modernization’. The British colonial system, informal as well as formal, integrated localities into the world’s economy. In this interpretation, the British Empire was less an actual empire than a set of makeshift and pragmatic structures designed to stabilize and sustain British influence and control. Formal empire became necessary only when informal collaboration broke down. Robinson and Gallagher summarize the argument in a phrase that goes to the heart of their work: ‘informally whenever possible, formally only if necessary’. The

P1: KpB IBBK121-FM

xii

Trim: 156mm × 234mm Top: 52pt Gutter: 60pt Visual Culture Royal 234 × 156 July 24, 2015 10:1

FOREWORD

book thus explains contraction as well as expansion. It helps account for the end of the empire after the Second World War as well as its expansion in the late nineteenth century. At a deeper level, British imperialism from the late nineteenth century onwards was a reflexive reaction to the stirrings of Afro-Asian nationalism. Reduced to a caricature of the authors’ argument, African nationalism – not British imperialism – paradoxically becomes one of the central causes of the continent’s partition. *** When the book was published in the early 1960s, radical critics had already begun a hostile campaign against government secrecy. The ‘official mind’ suggested to some readers that Robinson and Gallagher were highly conservative and bent on whitewashing the Establishment. On the contrary. The two authors regarded themselves as outsiders rebelling against prevailing orthodoxies. By laying bare the secrets of the ‘red boxes’ used by ministers, they transformed the boxes into goldfish bowls. Both authors had working-class origins, though they eventually became members of the Establishment. In the last phase of his career, Robinson was not only a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, but also head of the Oxford history faculty. Gallagher later became Vice-Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Yet both always regarded themselves as gatecrashers. Robinson, for example, referred to the members of the Establishment as ‘those bastards’. It is useful to bear in mind the academic and military backgrounds of the two authors. Both won Cambridge fellowships on the basis of sheer intelligence and potential for scholarly achievement. Robinson served as an officer in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. He then worked briefly in the Colonial Office under Sir Andrew Cohen, who was, in Robinson’s view, the prototype of the district officer. Cohen later became the key Colonial Office figure in charge of economic development and trusteeship territories. Robinson’s doctoral thesis dealt with British officials who created the ‘trust’ in central Africa. The inhabitants of British colonies were ‘held in trust’ until able to stand on their own in the modern world. They were being prepared, at some point distant in time, to rule themselves. Robinson was mainly responsible for the Egyptian argument – the invasion precipitating the partition of Africa – which he put forward insistently despite gentle scepticism on the part of Gallagher. Robinson could be a formidable presence in seminar discussions, robustly pressing his own argument against dissent or counter-interpretation. He could be entertaining and infectiously humorous. He inspired some of his students to lifelong dedication to the study of modern empire. He followed Gallagher

P1: KpB IBBK121-FM

Trim: 156mm × 234mm Top: 52pt Gutter: 60pt Visual Culture Royal 234 × 156 July 24, 2015 10:1

FOREWORD

xiii

at Oxford, 1971–87, as the Beit Professor of the History of the British Commonwealth. The Beit Professorship is anchored in Balliol College. Robinson felt more at home there than did Gallagher, who referred to Balliol as ‘Siberia’. Part of Jack Gallagher’s formative experience was in a tank corps in North Africa during the Second World War. He refused a commission. He once said that the inscription on his tombstone should read ‘Tank Soldier and Historian’. After the War, he and Robinson pounded out the arguments of Africa and the Victorians in Cambridge pubs. At one point he unsuccessfully proposed marriage to Katharine Whitehorn, the famous columnist for the Observer. In the mid-1950s a research grant took him to Brazzaville. His insight into the radically different French Empire – centralized with the purpose of integrating every part of colonial life into France itself – can be traced mainly to his visit to equatorial Africa. The deft irony and Dickensian flavour of the book reflects his personality. Until the last part of his life, he was buoyant, generous and witty. He held the Beit Professorship in Oxford, 1963–71. After the publication of Africa and the Victorians, he pursued the history of Indian politics, forging with Anil Seal of Cambridge an intellectual partnership that he had previously held with Robinson. Late in life, Gallagher lost a part of a leg, amputated at the knee. The coruscating wit and the brilliance of the pen portraits in Africa and the Victorians can be traced mainly to him. Had it not been for Robinson’s wife, Alice (‘Tony’) Denny, Africa and the Victorians might never have been published. Such is her prominence in the venture that she should be regarded as the third author. An American and the daughter of a prominent journalist, she had – has – an eye for accuracy of detail as well as the typing skill to produce draft after draft with carbon copies. She possessed a keen sense of the public duty to stay informed and to be critically suspicious of government propaganda. She never hesitated to voice strong opinions on government subterfuge, whether American or British. She possessed the perseverance, patience and tact as well as tolerance to bring unity of interpretation to two quite different but complementary historians. She demonstrated a strong work ethic not only in drafting the chapters but also in the drudgery of checking bibliographical detail and chasing down lost notes. It fell mainly to her to make the ‘great cut’ of reducing the manuscript to publishable size. She and the two authors accomplished the reduction mainly by excising the early parts of the book that refuted Marxist theory and made explicit connections with their seminal article ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, published in 1953. The cut had a twofold effect. The book now assumed that readers knew the article, which held, among other things, that the British Empire

P1: KpB IBBK121-FM

xiv

Trim: 156mm × 234mm Top: 52pt Gutter: 60pt Visual Culture Royal 234 × 156 July 24, 2015 10:1

FOREWORD

resembled an iceberg, with the tip above the water representing the formal empire and the underwater part signifying the informal empire of trade and commerce. Unfortunately, the cut also gave the impression that the two authors had a contemptuous view of economic theory, holding only the economist Joseph Schumpeter in esteem. Schumpeter believed that the phenomena of modern empires involved more than profit and loss. The expansion of Europe, according to Schumpeter, revealed irrational traits of human nature, including war for the sake of war and empire for the sake of empire. Some of the protagonists in Africa and the Victorians were buccaneers driven by those fundamental passions. Yet at the level of the ‘official mind’, ministers and their permanent officials were empirical, cautious and consistent. If they had an overriding preoccupation, it was to uphold the global yet ramshackle structure of the empire and to protect the sea routes, especially those carrying trade and troops through the Suez Canal and around the Cape. For the late Victorians, the partition of Africa was but a sideshow to larger concerns – above all, India. This steady perspective makes the book a fascinating read and ensures its status as a classic work. WM. ROGER LOUIS