Okay, it’s National Review week at Literature R Us. I’m bouncing this post off a nice review by NR’s Kyle Sammin of Brit historian David Cannadine’s new book, Victorious Century, The United Kingdom 1809 – 1906. I’ve got Victorious Century already loaded on my ebook, but my backlog is pretty massive, so I won’t be getting to it for awhile. I have read the introduction, and I’m definitely looking forward to the rest. Kyle’s review only encourages my appetite, but what really has me going is one of his few criticisms of the book—Dave’s perhaps less than forthcoming discussion of the British appetite for conquest:
“While it is true [says Kyle] that Parliament never directed companies and colonial adventurers to conquer nearby lands, they always accepted the fruits of those efforts. The non-British reader could be forgiven for viewing Britain’s profession of reluctance with a gimlet eye. One unexpected annexation of a native Indian kingdom could be seen as an accident, but when the pattern is repeated time and again, and the men who carried out the invasions are rewarded instead of punished, one begins to suspect that the British government was less hesitant about its hegemony than it professed to be.”
Well, amen to that. A classic bit of British bullshit is the line “Britain acquired its empire in a fit of absence of mind.” In fact, for literally centuries, ambitious men went to “the colonies” and sought out every opportunity for conflict—a “forward” policy—knowing that the home government would back them up: “It’s a matter of honor, after all.” (Well, honor and greed)
In my readings of Victorian history, I was always fascinated by the fact that men like Gladstone and Disraeli, men whose entire lives centered around a few square miles of London, could have their careers vitally affected by bloody skirmishes in Africa. Disraeli’s government was severely shaken in 1879 thanks to the Battle of Isandlwana, when 750 British were killed by about a 1,000 Zulu warriors. Disraeli lost the subsequent election. Gladstone was driven in office in 1885 when “rebel forces” conquered the city of Khartoum in Sudan, massacring troops led by General Charles George Gordon.
Yet every disaster was mere prompt for another advance. Isandlwana led to the Zulu war, which ultimately resulted in the conquest of all of South Africa, and Khartoum produced the same effects in Sudan. Thousands of officers, administrators, journalists, businessmen, politicians, and any manner of other “experts” made careers and fortunes out of “Forward”. Defeat, yes, but retreat? Never!
Does this sound in the least bit familiar here and now in the present day? In 1900, every “serious” man in London believed that British prosperity depended on creating an African empire that would run literally from “Cairo to the Cape”, on the utterly absurd theory that otherwise a “hostile power” might march hundreds of miles inland to the headwaters of the Nile, dig an enormous canal hundreds of miles back to the Indian Ocean to divert said headwaters to the sea, thus destroying the economy of Egypt, causing (somehow) the collapse of British control of the Suez Canal, causing (somehow) the loss of British control of India, causing the collapse of the British Empire and British prosperity, all of this to be accomplished under the nose of the British Navy, then easily the most powerful in the world.
Today, of course, we don’t believe in such nonsense. We believe in much greater nonsense. We believe that we must promote democracy everywhere in the world, which is to say that we must harass every country in the world that resists our telling them what to do. We have the right, the duty, and indeed the necessity to expand our influence everywhere while no other nation has the right to expand its influence anywhere.
We insist on this necessity—the necessity, for example, of telling China how to behave, a nation with an economy almost equal to ours, with a population almost four times ours, located 6,000 miles away, even though we cannot tell Afghanistan what to do, a tiny, impoverished nation we have been occupying with “boots on the ground” for sixteen years. All of this sounds rational—indeed is taken for granted, never rises to the level of a conscious decision—in Washington.
Today virtually every “serious” man (and woman) in our nation’s capital believes that we are barely spending enough on defense, though in fact we easily spending more than twice as much as we “need”, since we have no enemy, something I am both unable and unwilling to stop moaning about. Even the most partisan Democrat will offer the barest peep of outrage at the disgusting lies routinely retailed by the right about American “retreat” under President Obama.1 Because they love that sweet, sweet Pentagon cash just too damn much.
While Victorian Britain had its thousands of outstretched palms, we have tens of thousands, the palms of generals and journalists, defense contractors and think tank double domes, Wilsonians and Jacksonians, Democrats and Republicans, all worshiping at the throne of “toughness”—toughness and mindlessness. Even the prospect of actual nuclear war with North Korea, which would be the necessary result of President Trump’s announced “policy”, evokes no response from anyone other than that “well, he can’t really mean that”. After all, when was the last time anyone won an election promising “peace”?
Afterwords
I don’t believe that Great Britain fell into the much discussed “Thucydides Trap,” explicated by such accomplished chin-strokers as Graham Allison and Hal Brands. The true cause of World War I was the determination of the three autocracies of Germany, Austria, and Russia to turn back the clock against the rising forces of democracy. Each sought a “big win” that would give its emperor the prestige necessary to dispense with the whole notion of representative government. Authority came from God, not the people.
Germany and Austria deliberately conspired to back Russia into a corner and force it to accept an Austrian conquest of Serbia. If the Czar lost his throne as a result, well, that wasn’t their problem.
The Czar, of course, didn’t want to lose his throne. He wanted a big win too, so he could get rid of the Duma, the new Russian parliament he had gotten stuck with as a result of the failure of his previous search for a big win, the Russo-Japanese War, which hadn’t worked out the way Russia planned.2
It’s not very likely that a war between the three emperors could be contained in the East—France’s status as a “Great Power” was utterly dependent on the survival of its Russian ally as a Great Power as well—but the possibility of peace in the West was eliminated by the German army’s infamous “Schlieffen Plan”, which required the destruction of France before the destruction of Russia. With that the case, Great Britain was inevitably pulled in, because it was impossible for the British to allow Germany to gain effective control of the Channel ports, which a German victory in the West would have guaranteed.
German ambition was made possible, of course, by the immense growth of German economic power from the period 1870-1914, which upset the balance of power in Europe without a war. “Germany,” sighed Henry Kissinger, who (occasionally) got it right, “too big for Europe, not big enough for the world.” A “big” argument—a meta- or mega-argument, perhaps—is that all of the major industrial nations at the time were slaves to the notion that only imperialism along the lines of the British model could generate the profits necessary to satisfy the rising expectations of “the masses” while also allowing the “natural rulers” of society to maintain their traditional aristocratic roles and lifestyles. An “enlightened Britain”, supposedly, could have allowed Germany to realize its “African dream”, an empire running horizontally across sub-Saharan Africa—dueling idiocies, one might say—an empire that probably would have bankrupted the Germans, while condemning millions of Africans to a rebirth of the horrors of the slave trade.3 But I’m afraid it’s impossible to imagine “men of affairs” behaving so sensibly.
The U.S., I fear, is more likely to fall into the Thucydides trap than the Brits were. The recent decision by Chinese President Xi Jinping to essentially declare himself president for life has been greeted with barely disguised glee by hawks all over America. “Oh, boy! Those guys really need a lesson in democracy now! And we’re just the ones to give it to ‘em! Another Cold War! Another Cold War! Fifty more years of ballooning defense budgets, never-ending crises, and ever-increasing tension, and ever-expanding career opportunities for people like me! Just like the good old days!”
