Britain’s Liberal Empire 1897–1921: Volume 1 of Imperial Sunset

405 Pages·1987·43.119 MB·English

by  Max Beloff (auth.)

BRITAIN'S LIBERAL EMPIRE 1897 -1921
Also by Max Seloff
DREAM OF COMMONWEALTH, 1921-42 (Volume 2 of IMPERIAL
SUNSET) (in preparation)
PUBLIC ORDER AND POPULAR DISTURBANCES, 1660-1714
THE FOREIGN POLICY OF SOVIET RUSSIA (2 volumes)
THOMAS JEFFERSON AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
SOVIET POLICY IN THE FAR EAST, 1944-51
THE AGE OF ABSOLUTISM, 1660-1815
FOREIGN POLICY AND THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS
EUROPE AND THE EUROPEANS
THE GREAT POWERS
THE AMERICAN FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
NEW DIMENSIONS IN FOREIGN POLICY
THE UNITED STATES AND THE UNITY OF EUROPE
THE BALANCE OF POWER
THE FUTURE OF BRITISH FOREIGN POLICY
THE INTELLECTUAL IN POLITICS
THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED KINGDOM (with G. R. Peele)
WARS AND WELFARE, 1914-1945
Edited by Max Beloff
THE FEDERALIST
MANKIND AND HIS STORY
THE DEBATE ON THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
ON THE TRACK OF TYRANNY
L'EUROPE DU XIXe ET XXe SIECLE
AMERICAN POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS IN THE 1970s (with V. Vale)
BRITAIN'S LIBERAL EMPIRE
1897-1921
Volume I of IMPERIAL SUNSET
MAX BELOFF
Emeritus Professor of Government and Public Administration
University of Oxford
Second Edition
M
PALGRAVE
MACMILLAN
© Max Beloff 1969, 1987
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 2nd edition 1987
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Second edition (Macmillan) 1987
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Beloff, Max
Imperial sunset. -2nd ed
Vol. I: Britain's liberal empire 1897-1921
I. Great Britain-Colonies-History
2. Great Britain-Foreign relations
-20th century
I. Title
325'.32'0941 DAI6
ISBN 978-0-333-44491-7 ISBN 978-1-349-18957-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-18957-1
for Michael and Jeremy
CONTENTS
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION page ix
SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS XIX
CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION I
The choice of Europe . The reversal of fortunes . Persons and
influences . Summary of this volume
CHAPTER II: DIAMOND JUBILEE 20
Threats to the empire . Defence and imperial unity: Ireland·
Costs and complications in ruling India . The new imperialism
and Cecil Rhodes' Chamberlain and Salisbury· The generation
in power . Pressures for reform . Fissures within the Empire
70
CHAPTER III: THE WEARY TITAN
The turning-point . The Boer war and imperial cohesion . The
creation of the C.l.D . . Reshaping naval policy· Military re
organization . The tariff reform argument . Colonial views on
tariff reform . The pressures on imperial strategy
CHAPTER IV: THE EMPIRE AND THE ENTENTES 108
Policies and politics in the liberal era . New personalities •
Moves for change and reform· South Africa - the touchstone'
Imperialism, tariffs, and Milner· The Round Table' Radical
attitudes . The dominions' differing views . The dictates of
defence . The dominions and naval and military dispositions .
Indian nationalism and defence . The intractability of the Irish
question . The North Atlantic triangle· From peace to war
CHAPTER V: WAR AND WAR AIMS 181
PAR T I: Britain, the Empire and early peace feelers
Basic considerations' The political machinery for waging war'
Imperial factors, the dominions and Ireland' India and the war'
Early war aims and peace feelers· Lloyd George and reorganiza
tion . The 'left' against the 'new imperialists' . Imperial con
sultation and economic cohesion
Vll
CONTENTS
PART II: The United States and victory 229
Early Anglo-Americanfriction· Wilson the peacemaker· Later
imperial war aims· The American susceptihilities and claims •
The Middle East· The Balfour declaration· The United
States and peace terms . Peace - The final pressures
CHAPTER VI: THE EMPIRE AND THE PEACE 274
The demand for securiry • The Empire and peace terms • The
Paris peace conference . The dominions, the League and man
dates· The Middle East settlement and relations with France·
Constitutional advance in India . Dominion status: India and
Ireland· The 1921 imperial conference· Coming to terms with
Europe • Britain and the holsheviks • The Anglo-American
understanding· The Far East
CHAPTER VII: APOGEE OF EMPIRE 344
CHRONOLOGY 1897-192 I 366
INDEX 373
MAPS: The British Empire in 1897 362
Imperial acquisitions in the peace settlement 364
viii
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
When the first edition of this book was published in 1969 I had
hoped that a sequel would follow very rapidly. For a variety of
reasons my work on this project was interrupted. I now hope if all
goes well to produce the second volume of 'Imperial Sunset' for
publication in 1988. Meanwhile the republication of the first volume
gives me an opportunity to look at the period that has elapsed since
1969 and to see what additional insights it provides in respect of the
problems I undertook to investigate.
Such insights derive from two sources. There has been a large
volume of historical scholarship devoted to all aspects of the imperial
history of the period with which I was dealing, making use in large
part of materials that became available subsequently to the works
upon which I myself had to rely. In the second place there have been
the events in the ongoing history of Britain's relations with the rest of
the Commonwealth and with the rest of the world that cannot but
affect one's judgement of their antecedents.
One reviewer of the first edition complained that I had made too
much of the debate over Britain's possible entry into the European
Communities which had become 'an intellectual and political bore',
and felt that the knowledge that the EEC represented one of the
'author's ultimate guidelines' cast 'its own shadow' across the book
as a whole. On that score, I feel time has justified my original
I
conception. Britain has become a member of the European
Communities and with every year that passes, this fact becomes of
increasing significance in its economic and political aspects and in its
impact upon Britain's domestic affairs. On the other hand, the
Commonwealth has clearly been downgraded in the list of Britain's
priorities and with important divergencies of opinion developing
among its member governments and with Britain occupying a less
central role in the affairs of many member countries, even its
perpetuation has been called into question. It seems more than ever
reasonable to look at the development from British Empire into
British Commonwealth and (latterly) from British Commonwealth
into Commonwealth as a reaction not only to internal developments
lX
PREFACE
within the British system but also to the changing balances in
economic and military power to which Britain's rulers were
responding. In respect of that approach I see no need to change the
framing of my original inquiry.
Domestic as well as international developments have also in
evitably produced a new perspective upon the earlier period. A
whole school of historical interpretation has grown up, of which Mr
Correlli Barnett was the pioneer which sees in the decline of British
power the consequence of an inadequate attention to industrial
development, and the Empire-Commonwealth as, if anything, a
burden rather than an asset to the home country.2 Or again, the
growing salience of race-relations as an issue of internal British
politics has produced an examination of earlier British attitudes on
questions of race and an effort to link the ideologies and practices of
Empire and Commonwealth to changing conceptions of race. 3 These
in turn are shown to have rested in large part upon developments in
the natural and human sciences and particularly in anthropology
which to some extent bridges that divide. The impact of such ideas
as well as of changes in the religious outlook draws attention to the
role of universities and in particular of Oxford as the main source in
the pre-1914 period of the Empire's administrators and a principal
source of its missionaries and teachers.4
The way in which one looks at these and other aspects of the
imperial decline will indeed in part be a question of generations. A
schoolboy growing up as I did, with much of the map coloured red
and with memories of several visits to the British Empire Exhibition
at Wembley at the age oftwelve, must see things differently from the
way in which they are seen by those whose most impressionable
years fell during the height of the period of , deco Ionisation' after the
second world war.5 And for today's youngsters Britain is no more
than an offshore island with a cluster of tiny dependencies showing·
their peaks above the enveloping ocean like signposts to a lost,
continent.6
Geographical perspective may also give important differences of
emphasis. It is not surprising that the author of important books
offering a very critical handling of British imperialism should have
spent much of his teaching career outside Britain.7 Others,
particularly the non-British and particularly perhaps Americans
with their inbuilt anti-imperial bias, may see the British imperial
x