Pax Britannica by Jan Morris

Pharaohs.
    But in theory self-government was seen as the end of good government. Ancient British principles demanded it. It must have seemed remote indeed, in the swamps of the Sudanese sudd, or among the naked Indians of the Guiana jungles, but there were many imperialists who carried Darwin’s ideas yet a stage farther, and saw the whole grand progress of the Empire in evolutionary terms. Britain was, of course, the fulfilment, populus sapiens. The self-governing colonies were great apes among the species. Many lesser colonies, mostly with a white settler class, had achieved some representative institutions and were thus learning the way out of the ooze. And down at the bottom, inchoate and utterly dependent, lay the primitive territories of Africa and Asia, dressed in scales. Teaching nations how to live had been a British vocation for centuries: one of the grand visions of imperialism presented the Pax Britannica as a stupendous progress towards universal democratic liberalism— God making man in his own image, or enabling the world, as Younghusband thought, ‘to become all that heart and mind know there is in it to be’. It was unfortunate but inevitable that the first step in the process should so often be one of conquest. At this cathartic moment of their history, the British seers were thinking in terms of generations, centuries even, and the absorption of an African tribe, or the humiliation of an Asian culture, was no more than a chip in the slate.
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    On a Governmental level the New Imperialism was largely defensive, and the glory came extra. There had been a time when Britain’s material strength was more or less equal with that of her principal rivals—first the Dutch, then the French. A brilliant period ofscientific discovery and energy had, in the earlier years of Victoria’s reign, given the British their commanding lead. Supreme in technology, and spared the fearful expense of great standing armies, Britain was not only able to enrich herself as workshop of the world, but by building the biggest of navies, and thus gaining complete security at home and unique advantages abroad, to feel herself a citadel, unassailable.
    Times were now changing. Britain’s technical lead was shortening. Her economic progress was slowing down. Her rivals were building great navies of their own, and hungering for empires, too. When Kipling travelled for the first time outside the British Empire he was astonished first to discover the vigorous maturity of Japan, so breezily different from India after two centuries of British rule, and then to find, in the United States, the nucleus of a nation which would one day far overshadow the power of Britain—the ‘biggest, finest and best people’, he foresaw, on the face of the earth. Such premonitions forced the British into expansion, and especially into the scramble for Africa. On the surface all was bombast, beneath there was much anxiety. The British saw their markets, their communications, even the security of their own islands, threatened for the first time since the Napoleonic Wars. The voluminous literature of the New Imperialism was full of warnings about Britain as a second-rate Power.
    For Britain was the most envied and disliked of the great states. Her competitors were all too eager to abase her. To some percipient observers there was to the gathering of foreign notables in London that summer the faint first suggestion of jackals assembling. The Jubilee celebrations were specifically designed to keep them at bay, or send them ‘slouching homeward to their snow’. Britain was not finished yet, ran the message, and imperialism, properly exploited, could keep her indefinitely supreme. The British nations scattered around the globe, supported by all the manpower and minerals of the tropical Empire, would one day constitute a super-Power to dwarf all opposition. Before the end of the twentieth century, the economist David A. Wells forecast, the population of Australia