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'How did Britain come to rule the world?' asks Niall Ferguson in Empire. What would today's world be like now if it hadn't? Could such an organisation – run by, according to Winston Churchill, 'the greedy trader, the inopportune missionary, the ambitious soldier and the lying spectator' – ever have been a force for good? Niall Ferguson – writer and presenter of the Channel 4 series Empire – is Herzog Professor of Financial History at New York University and Visiting Professor of Political and Financial History at Oxford University. He is the author of Paper and Iron, The House of Rothschild, The Pity of War and The Cash Nexus and editor of Virtual History. In this edited extract from the book, he explains how the British empire provided the framework for present-day globalisation. |
It has become almost a commonplace that globalisation today has much in common with the integration of the world economy in the decades before 1914. But what exactly does this over-used word mean? Is it, as Cobden implied, an economically determined phenomenon, in which the free exchange of commodities and manufactures tends 'to unite mankind in the bonds of peace'? Or might free trade require a political framework within which to work?
Promote and imposeThe Leftist opponents of globalisation naturally regard it as no more than the latest manifestation of a damnably resilient international capitalism. By contrast, the modern consensus among liberal economists is that increasing economic openness raises living standards, even if there will always be some net losers as hitherto privileged or protected social groups are exposed to international competition.
But economists and economic historians alike prefer to focus their attention on flows of commodities, capital and labour. They say less about flows of knowledge, culture and institutions. They also tend to pay more attention to the ways government can facilitate globalisation by various kinds of deregulation than to the ways it can actively promote and, indeed, impose it.
The result of coercionEconomists have come to appreciate the importance of legal, financial and administrative institutions such as the rule of law, credible monetary regimes, transparent fiscal systems and incorrupt bureaucracies in encouraging cross- border capital flows. But how did the West European versions of such institutions spread as far and wide as they did?
In a few rare cases – the most obvious being that of Japan – there was a process of conscious, voluntary imitation. But more often than not, European institutions were imposed by main force, often literally at gunpoint. In theory, globalisation may be possible in an international system of multilateral cooperation, spontaneously arising as Cobden envisaged. But it may equally well be possible as a result of coercion if the dominant power in the world favours economic liberalism. Empire – and specifically the British empire – is the instance that springs to mind.
A Good ThingToday, the principal barriers to an optimal allocation of labour, capital and goods in the world are, on the one hand, civil wars and lawless, corrupt governments – which together have condemned so many countries in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia to decades of impoverishment – and, on the other, the reluctance of the United States and her allies to practise as well as preach free trade, or to devote more than a trifling share of their vast resources to programmes of economic aid.
By contrast, for much (though certainly not all) of its history, the British empire acted as an agency for imposing free markets, the rule of law, investor protection and relatively incorrupt government on a roughly a quarter of the world. The empire also did a good deal to encourage those things in countries which were outside its formal imperial domain but under its economic influence through the 'imperialism of free trade'. Prima facie, there therefore seems a plausible case that empire enhanced global welfare – was, in other words, a Good Thing.
ZealousMany charges can, of course, be levelled against the British empire. I do not claim, as John Stuart Mill did, that British rule in India was 'not only the purest in intention but one of the most beneficent in act ever known to mankind'; nor, as Lord Curzon did, that 'the British Empire is under Providence the greatest instrument for good that the world has seen'; nor, as General Smuts claimed, that it was 'the widest system of organised human freedom which has ever existed in human history'.
The empire was never so altruistic. In the 18th century, the British were indeed as zealous in the acquisition and exploitation of slaves as they were subsequently zealous in trying to stamp slavery out; and for much longer they practised forms of racial discrimination and segregation that we today consider abhorrent.
When imperial authority was challenged – in India in 1857, in Jamaica in 1831 and 1865, in South Africa in 1899 – the British response was brutal. When famine struck – in Ireland in the 1840s, in India in the 1870s – their response was negligent, in some measure positively culpable. Even when they took a scholarly interest in oriental cultures, perhaps they did subtly denigrate them in the process.
Signal virtuesYet the fact remains that no organisation in history has done more to promote the free movement of goods, capital and labour than the British empire in the 19th and early 20th centuries. And no organisation has done more to impose Western norms of law, order and governance around the world.
To characterise all this as 'gentlemanly capitalism' risks underselling the scale - and modernity – of the achievement in the sphere of economics, just as criticism of the 'ornamental' (meaning hierarchical) character of British rule overseas tends to overlook the signal virtues of what were remarkably non-venal administrations.
Achievements and sinsThe difficulty with the achievements of empire is that they are much more likely to be taken for granted than the sins of empire. It is, however, instructive to try to imagine a world without the British empire. But while it is just about possible to imagine what the world would have been like without the French Revolution or the First World War, the imagination reels from the counterfactual of modern history without the British empire.
As I travelled around that empire's remains, I was constantly struck by its ubiquitous creativity. To imagine the world without the empire would be to expunge from the map the elegant boulevards of Williamsburg and old Philadelphia; to sweep into the sea the squat battlements of Port Royal, Jamaica; to return to the bush the glorious skyline of Sydney; to level the steamy seaside slum that is Freetown, Sierra Leone; to fill in the Big Hole at Kimberley; to demolish the mission at Kuruman; to send the town of Livingstone hurtling over the Victoria Falls – which would, of course, revert to their original name of Mosioatunya. Without the British empire, there would be no Calcutta, no Bombay, no Madras. Indians may rename them as many times as they like, but they remain cities founded and built by the British.
Fingerprints of empireIt is, of course, tempting to argue that it would all have happened anyway, albeit with different names. Perhaps the railways would have been invented and exported by another European power. Perhaps the telegraph cables would have been laid across the sea by someone else. Maybe, as Cobden claimed, the same volumes of trade would have gone on without bellicose empires meddling in peaceful commerce. Maybe, too, the great movements of population which transformed the cultures and complexions of whole continents would have happened anyway.
Yet there is reason to doubt that the world would have been the same or even similar in the absence of the empire. Even if we allow for the possibility that trade, capital flows and migration could have been 'naturally occurring' in the past 300 years, there remain the flows of culture and institutions. And here the fingerprints of empire seem more readily discernible and less easy to expunge.
Distinctive featuresWhen the British governed a country – even when they only influenced its government by flexing their military and financial muscles – there were certain distinctive features of their own society that they tended to disseminate. A list of the more important of these would run as follows:
- The English language
- English forms of land tenure
- Scottish and English banking
- The common law
- Protestantism
- Team sports
- The limited or 'night watchman' state
- Representative assemblies
- The idea of liberty.
The last of these is perhaps the most important because it remains the most distinctive feature of the empire – the thing that sets it apart from its continental European rivals.
A liberal critiqueI do not mean to claim that all British imperialists were liberals: some were very far from it. But what is very striking about the history of the empire is that, whenever the British were behaving despotically, there was almost always a liberal critique of that behaviour from within British society.
Indeed, so powerful and consistent was this tendency to judge Britain's imperial conduct by the yardstick of liberty that it gave the British empire something of a self-liquidating character. Once a colonised society had sufficiently adopted the institutions the British brought with them, it became very hard for the British to deny them that political liberty to which they attached so much significance for themselves.
What might have been?Would other empires have produced the same effects? It seems doubtful. In my travels, I caught many glimpses of world empires that might have been:
- in dilapidated Chinsura, a vision of how all Asia might have looked if the Dutch empire had not declined and fallen
- in whitewashed Pondicherry, which all India might have resembled if the French had won the Seven Years' War
- in dusty Delhi, where the Mughal empire might have been restored if the Indian Mutiny had not been crushed in 1858
- in Kanchanaburi, where the Japanese empire built its bridge on the River Kwai with British slave labour.
Would New Amsterdam be the New York we know today if the Dutch had not surrendered it to the British in 1664? Might it not resemble more closely Bloemfontein, an authentic survivor of Dutch colonisation?
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For better or worse – fair and foul – the world we know today is in large measure a product of Britain's age of empire. The question is not whether British imperialism was without blemish. It was not. The question is whether there could have been a less bloody path to modernity. Perhaps in theory there could have been. But in practice?