Читать книгу Island Stories: Britain and Its History in the Age of Brexit - David Reynolds - Страница 10

On the face of it, decline might seem a plausible description of Great Britain’s changing place in the world over the last century or so. In the 1870s, the country possessed more battleships than the rest of the world combined. It directly controlled about a fifth of the earth’s surface, including India, Canada and Australasia. It was the world’s largest economy, accounting for over 20 per cent of global manufacturing output and a similar proportion of global trade. The first industrial nation had become the greatest power the world had ever seen. A century later, however, Britain had lost nearly all its overseas territories; it accounted for a mere 4 per cent of world manufacturing and about 7 per cent of world trade. The first post-industrial nation was struggling to find its post-imperial role.

Membership of the EEC from 1973 was supposed to resolve that identity crisis – the loss of an outmoded global empire would be offset by a new European dynamic. But in the wake of the 2016 referendum, Brexiters claimed that ‘Europe’ had been a blind alley and that leaving the EU in 2019 was the way to reverse national decline and retrieve Britain’s global greatness.

Yet this preoccupation with Britain’s ‘decline’ can mislead. More historically remarkable is the coutry’s rise. That, indeed, had been Gibbon’s thesis in the case of Rome: ‘The rise of a city, which swelled into an empire, may deserve, as a singular prodigy, the reflection of a philosophic mind. But the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness.’ Similarly, observed a more recent historian, François Crouzet, ‘it is a mistake to think that England’s original supremacy was normal and her decline abnormal.’[29] On the contrary, what really needs explanation is the original ‘supremacy’.

To put it simply, Great Britain stood in the forefront of the great surges of European expansion that shaped the world between 1700 and 1900: commerce and conquest in the eighteenth century, industry and empire in the nineteenth century. All these movements were intertwined with the lucrative Atlantic slave trade – half of all Africans carried into slavery during the eighteenth century were transported on British vessels – and the profits from that trade lubricated Britain’s commercial and industrial revolutions.[30] The country’s principal advantage was a relatively secure island base during what was still the era of seapower. Unlike rivals such as France and Prussia/Germany, who shared land borders with bellicose neighbours, Britain could shelter behind the English Channel – what Shakespeare called the country’s ‘moat defensive,’ its ‘water-walled bulwark’. Or, to quote Gladstone in 1870, ‘the wise dispensation of Providence has cut her off by that streak of silver sea … partly from the dangers, absolutely from the temptations, which attend the local neighbourhood of the Continental nations.’[31] Insularity did not guarantee immunity – in 1588, 1804 and 1940 the threat of invasion seemed acute – but it did mean that the British did not require a large standing army of the sort that became normal on the Continent. The Royal Navy, however, was popular and also necessary, not just for direct defence but also because, as an island, increasingly dependent on the import of food and raw materials, Britain needed to protect its seaborne commerce from peacetime privateers and wartime enemies.

Britain’s insular position left it ideally placed to capitalise on five great bouts of warfare against France. Whereas French leaders from Louis XIV to Napoleon Bonaparte had to fight their primary battles on land against continental foes, Britain was able to divert more of its resources into the struggle for trade and colonies. The Seven Years’ War of 1756–63 left the British in control of most of North America and although thirteen colonies won their independence during the next world war of 1776–83, Britain held on to what became Canada and the British West Indies. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars of 1793–1815 was a period of extended crisis, during which Britain endured long periods of economic isolation, but, in the end, the country won a total victory. French seapower had been destroyed and Britain was left as the world’s main colonial power, paramount in India but also increasingly entrenched in Australasia and parts of Africa. Its fleet, previously based mostly at home and in the Baltic and Mediterranean, was now spread around the globe. The Royal Navy’s ability to command the seas depended on holding what Admiral Sir John Fisher, First Sea Lord at the start of the Great War, called the ‘five strategic keys’ that ‘lock up the world’ – the great British bases at Dover, Gibraltar, Alexandria, the Cape of Good Hope and Singapore.[32]

Established at strategic points around the globe, able to project power through a strong navy and merchant fleet, Britain after 1815 also enjoyed the huge advantage of becoming the world’s first industrial nation. The country’s initial manufacturing surge had been driven by the cotton trade. All the raw material was imported and most of the production was for export. By 1830, cotton goods accounted for half the value of British exports and raw cotton made up 20 per cent of net imports. After the cotton boom subsided, iron and steel became the new growth sector, stimulated by the railway-building mania of the 1830s and 1840s, and then sustained by British dominance in the financing and construction of railways around the world. By 1860, a country with only 2 per cent of the world’s population was producing half the world’s iron and steel and accounted for 40 per cent of world trade in manufactured goods. It had the highest GDP in the world and its population, despite vast inequalities of wealth, enjoyed the highest average per capita income.[33]

During much of the Victorian era, therefore, Britain did seem truly great as the leading colonial empire, the world’s industrial giant and the dominant sea power. In the decades after 1815, the Royal Navy appeared to rule the waves, driving piracy from the Indian Ocean and the China Seas, confronting slave traders in the Caribbean and South Atlantic, and aggressively promoting Britain’s commercial interests – particularly in the Opium War of 1839–42 to open up China to British trade. Many foreign leaders had no doubt that British power was decisive. ‘Only England, mistress of the seas, can protect us against the united force of European reaction,’ exclaimed Simón BolÍvar, the liberator of South America, as he contemplated the danger of Spanish reconquest. Muhammad Ali, the Ottomans’ unruly viceroy of Egypt, remarked that ‘with the English for my friends I can do anything: without their friendship I can do nothing’.[34] The analogy between the Pax Britannica and the Pax Romana did not sound far-fetched. Like Rome, Britain seemed to rule or shape much of the world, and was what the poet Alfred Tennyson rhapsodised in 1886 as

… the mightiest Ocean-power on earth

Our own fair isle, the lord of every sea.[35]

The country’s global power was on flamboyant display during celebrations for Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in June 1897. A week of martial festivities culminated in a vast naval pageant off the Isle of Wight when the Queen reviewed 165 of her warships manned by 40,000 sailors. The highpoint was 22 June when Her Majesty processed in state along six miles of London streets amid cheering crowds. Speaking for most observers, the Manchester Guardian described the theme of the celebrations as ‘the world-wide Empire of Britain … the exultant expression of a power the greatest in the world’s history’. Onlookers were particularly intrigued by contingents of troops from the Queen’s domains all over the globe. A reporter for the new popular newspaper The Daily Mail could hardly contain his patriotic fervour as he described them marching up Ludgate Hill to St Paul’s:

white men, yellow men, brown men, black men, every colour, every continent, every race, every speech – and all up in arms for THE BRITISH EMPIRE AND THE BRITISH QUEEN. Up they came, more and more, new types, new realms at every couple of yards, an anthropological museum – a living gazeteer of the British Empire. With them came their English officers, whom they obey and follow like children. And you begin to understand, as never before what the Empire amounts to.[36]

Much of the rhetoric from that week in June 1897 was similarly extravagant, often preposterous. A jubilee mug, inscribed with portraits of the 78-year-old monarch, carried the legend The Centre of a World’s Desire. A Canadian poet penned his own tribute:

Here’s to Queen Victoria

Dressed in all her regalia

With one foot in Canada

And the other in Australia.[37]

A truly remarkable posture, but not one that could be sustained for long. In fact, the world we have lost was one that we were bound to lose. Britain’s global power was always more limited than appearances suggested. A closer look at the nature of that power – economic, international and imperial – will help explain why.