The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred by Niall Ferguson Page B

that marked the Emperor Francis Joseph’s birthday, they staged colourful festivities that celebrated their ethnic diversity. British theorists of empire like Frederick Lugard began to argue that ‘indirect rule’, which effectively delegated substantial power to local chiefs and maharajas, was preferable to hands-on ‘direct rule’. Even so, the Western empires were, like their Eastern counterparts, manifestly nearing their ends, as Rudyard Kipling divined in ‘Recessional’ (1897), his finest poem. By the end of the nineteenth century, the costs to the British of maintaining control over their distant possessions were perceptibly rising relative to the benefits, which in any case flowed to a relatively few wealthy investors. Guy de Maupassant’s
Bel-Ami
(1885) gives a good flavour of the unedifying nexus that had developed between political elites, financial markets and imperial expansion:
She was saying:
    ‘Oh, they’ve done something very clever. Very clever… It really is a wonderful operation… An expedition against Tangier had been agreed upon between the two of them the day Laroche became Foreign Secretary and gradually they’ve been buying up the whole of the Moroccan loan which had dropped to sixty-four or sixty-five francs. They did their buying very cleverly, using… shady dealers who wouldn’t arouse any suspicion. They even succeeded in fooling the Rothschilds, who were surprised at seeing such a steady demand for Moroccan stock. Their reply was to mention the names of all the dealers involved, all unreliable and on their beam ends. That calmed the big banks’ suspicions. And so now we’re going to send an expedition and as soon as we’ve succeeded, the French government will guarantee the Moroccan debt. Our friends will have made about fifty or sixty million francs. You see how it works?’…
    He said: ‘It really is very clever. As for that louse Laroche, I’ll get even withhim for this. The blackguard! He’d better look out… I’ll have his ministerial blood for this!’
    Then he began to think. He said more quietly:
    ‘But we ought to take advantage of it.’
    ‘You can still buy the loan,’ she said. ‘It’s only at seventy-two.’
    To be sure, widening franchises at home and in some settler colonies did not necessarily portend decolonization – if anything, the British Empire became truly popular only in the last half-century of its existence. But democratization did make it harder to justify major peacetime expenditures on imperial security when metropolitan electorates were manifestly more interested in social security. Only in time of war, as the British discovered in their painful struggle to subjugate the Boers, could the public be relied on to rally to the flag; and even that emotion could quickly turn to disenchantment when the price of victory became clear. This was something of which even the most enthusiastic imperialists were acutely aware. Of the 726,000 people who had left the United Kingdom in the last decade of the nineteenth century, 72 per cent had gone not to other parts of the British Empire but to the United States. ‘The great problem of the coming years’, conceded
The Times
uneasily,
will be to consolidate the Empire, to bring its several parts into organic and vital relation with each other and with the old country, their common origin and home, to convert the noble impulse which has led the sons of all the colonies to help the Empire in its need [in South Africa] into a working bond of indissoluble union.
    As the newspaper admitted, however, ‘the solution of this problem is not to be propounded off-hand’.
MISCEGENATION
    This imperial world had once been a racial melting pot. Whether in the Caribbean, America or India, British businessmen and soldiers had felt no compunction about sleeping with and in many cases marrying indigenous women. To take a native concubine had beenthe norm for employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company; it had been positively