Britain’s PMs W.E. Gladstone and Lord Salisbury. Both simply managers of empire, glorified scoundrels.

Nu’man Abd al-Wahid, WarIsACrime.org
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[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hether one is critical of the alliance between the United Kingdom and the United States or in favour of the so-called “Special Relationship” it is perceived to be an amicable, natural and trans-historical partnership between two nations who share the same language and whose global interests are more or less the same. Over the last fifteen years these two nations assumed the lead in their continuing support of the colonialist state of Israel and waging war on Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and calling for more military intervention in Syria and Iran. So it is no surprise that many find it hard to accept that this alliance is a recent advent rooted in geo-political exigencies of the historical moment at hand. British imperialism was animus, if not outright antithetical, in the first 150 years of the Republic.

Writing, if not gloating, in the midst of the American civil war in the nineteenth century, the future British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury (a.k.a. Robert Cecil) heralded not only the end of the United States of America but democracy itself or as he referred to it the “evil of universal suffrage.”[1] American democracy and the vaunted republic he gleefully boasted were not only a failed experiment and a busted flush but the “most ignominious failure the world had ever seen.” It had become, in our esteemed Lord’s eyes, what today would be referred to derogatively and pejoratively, as a ‘failed state’.

The main reason for this inevitable failure according to Cecil was that the United States had rejected and overthrown its natural leaders, i.e. the British establishment. As such they are now richly “reaping a harvest that was sown as far back as the time of Jefferson.” The Americans had substituted genuine leadership for a dreamer’s theory (the works of Thomas Jefferson) and more so, in the present climate, Abraham Lincoln was an “ass”, an incompetent and “the most conspicuous cause of the present calamities.”[2]

Another British Minister, William Gladstone too had little time for Lincoln and came out in support of the Southern Confederacy. The Gladstone family had become wealthy largely owing to the family’s slave camps in Jamaica and William’s maiden speech in parliament was a defence of the family business which arose from the slave trading port of Liverpool. Although William Gladstone represented constituents in the family’s native parliamentary seat of Midlothian, Scotland, his father had represented Liverpool in Parliament.[3]

At the time of the civil war Liverpool’s economy as well as that of the wider North-west region of England was mostly reliant on cotton imported from the American south and then distributed to the cotton mills of Lancashire and Cheshire. Lincoln’s Union army’s blockade of Southern ports caused a massive disruption to this trade.

CSS Alabama tearing apart the Union ship Hatteras in Galveston bay, Texas.

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The blockade also affected the South’s ship manufacturing facilities. As such they turned to Great Britain for ship and gunboat manufacturing. Two ships stand out. The first was the ‘Alabama’ which once operational sunk 65 union ships. The other Confederate ship was a trade ship re-fitted as a gunboat, ‘Shenandoah’ which once sent out to battle “captured nearly 40 prizes” i.e. that is hijacked and looted 40 union and other ships. Needless to say the crew on both ships were mostly manned by British personnel.[4]Claims were made that these ships were “decoying their victims with the British flag.”[5]

Opportunistic to the core, the British Empire did not intervene in the American civil war because the establishment theorised that the Union could defend itself, and with more technologically advanced ships, sink their fleet. 

In parliament 74 members were in favour of the confederacy, while only 17 were pro North, pro Lincoln.[6]The British political establishment were clearly waiting for the right time to intervene on behalf of the south yet at the same time they were loathe to spread the Empire’s resources “too thinly across the globe.”[7]

In September 1862, the Empire felt the time had come to recognise the Confederacy. The two factors which determined this judgement were the Confederacy’s defeat of the Northern army of the Potomac in Manassas and its subsequent invasion of Maryland. After the two armies fought to standstill in Maryland, the Confederacy troops retreated back to their stronghold, Virginia. On the back of this battle, Lincoln issued the ‘Emancipation Proclamation’ which the British Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston condemned as illegal, hypocritical and against the American constitution.[8] The British establishment were joined by many British workers who too greeted the Proclamation with cynical disdain and support for the South.[9]The Guardian newspaper claimed that the “people are not so easily deluded” by the Proclamation and continued to support the South and to refer to Lincoln as a despot.[10]

Calculating Lord Palmerston had no use for Lincoln, whom he thought a despot. Eventually he stayed out of the War Between the States.

However, all was not lost for the Empire, and Palmerstone earmarked May or June 1863 as the best time to recognise the pro-slavery South. But in the 1860s armour plated vessels began to be introduced to navy fleets. The French had introduced theirs in 1859, while the British introduced the HMS Warrior in 1860. The Confederacy’s Virginia was introduced in 1862, the Union unleashed the USS Monitor very shortly after. ( CLICK IMAGE TO EXAPAND )

Watching the battle from the sidelines, it dawned on the Empire that the Union ship was more technologically advanced than their ‘Warrior’ and many more were under construction in Northern ports. The British carried out tests to see if the Empire’s navy could withstand the new Union firepower. They couldn’t and it was reasoned that if the Empire now intervened on behalf of the South, it would be only a matter of time before the North sent its ships across the Atlantic and rendered Her Majesty’s “wooden fleet in great peril.”[11]The Empire did not intervene in the American civil war because the establishment theorised that the Union could defend itself.

In 1863 the good people of Manchester burned an effigy of Lincoln on Guy Fawkes night. When the war was over the highly esteemed good people of Manchester built a statue in his honour[12] or as one historian wrote, a dead Lincoln “was no danger; nothing could be lost and peace of mind could then be gained by lauding his neglected virtues.”[13]The Empire also paid compensation to the United States for lost ships at the hands of the British.

It was not then until the late Victorian period that the United States and United Kingdom once again came close to crossing swords. A dispute arose between the British Empire’s colony, British Guiana and the independent state of Venezuela. The latter since more or less its creation earlier in the nineteenth century had made persistent claims to territory in British Guiana. The Empire on the other had the power to contemptuously brush these claims aside.

The Empire’s delineation of the boundary between Venezuela and Guiana was based on the results of a survey conducted by Great Britain’s Prime Minister, Lord Palmerstone envoy, Robert Schomburgk in 1835. This boundary came to be known as the Schomburgk Line. Venezuela had claimed that this boundary line was wrong and furthermore once gold mines were discovered the Empire extended its reach and claimed more of Venezuelan territory.

After many years of appealing to the Empire to no avail the Venezuelans were left no choice but to enlist the support of the United States. Richard Olney, a Secretary of State under President Grover Cleveland’s administration, sent a strongly worded note to the Empire on the 20^th July 1895.   Olney in the note, invoked the Monroe Doctrine, which meant no European nation (and that includes the British) had a right to newly intervene or impose itself in the Western hemisphere. For the then British Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury (a.k.a Robert Cecil), like many of the elite of his generation, the United States “counted for little in international affairs.”^[14] As such, he did not immediately respond and did not warrant Olney’s note a response until 26^th November 1895. Salisbury rejected American claims to arbitration and furthermore argued that the Monroe Doctrine does not apply to the dispute between the Empire and Venezuela. For Salisbury the Monroe Doctrine had no universal legislative authority.

Upon this response, President Cleveland successfully asked the United States Congress to authorise a boundary commission whose findings would be enforced “by every means.”[15] With the Empire entangled in disputes elsewhere as well as keeping a keen eye on the rise of new powers in Europe i.e. Germany and the Far East i.e. Japan, it could not stretch itself into potentially another conflict. Furthermore, Great Britain’s land grab for goldmines in Southern Africa known as the ‘Jameson Raid’ had failed. Knowing that war with the United States at this moment could strengthen its immediate adversaries in Europe, the Empire eventually acquiesced to American requests. Initially the Empire wanted to limit the geographical territory to be placed under arbitration. The Americans refused and the Empire capitulated and accepted unlimited arbitration.

The United States’ threat of war combined with the potential of imperialist overreach brought the Empire to the negotiating table over the boundary dispute. How ironic that Robert Cecil more or less thirty years after mocking and denigrating the United States during its civil war became the first British Prime Minister to capitulate and appease the [upstart] Republic.

In 1898, the military confrontation between the United States and the Spanish Empire arose. Although a myth has been circulated that the British were ‘tacitly’ on the side of the Americans nothing could be further from the truth.[16]Five days before the American Congress insisted that Spain get out of Cuba, the British ambassador in Washington congregated other European ambassadors and was partly responsible for drafting a proposal critical of the United States position “which was referred to their governments for approval.”[17]After Spain made concessions to the United States with regard to Cuba, the British ambassador and his European counterparts met once again to avert war. This time they recommended that their respective governments make representation to the United States’ embassies in six European capitals.[18]Britain did not do anything to assist its European partner largely because its focus was defending its imperial interests in Asia and Africa, rather than defending Imperial Spain. This was not pro-Americanism, simply national and imperial self-interest.[19]

In October 1899, as the British century was coming to an end, the second Boer War ignited between the Empire and the two South African European colonies of the Orange Free State and Transvaal.  The Empire captured the Transvaal capital in June 1900. Between September and October 1900 a general election was called which returned Lord Salisbury to power. However, in South Africa, guerrilla warfare took hold of the country. The Empire’s forces under the leadership of Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener finally crushed the resistance with a scorched earth policy, holding women and children in concentration camps and covering the country with barbed wire and blockhouses.[20] The Boers finally surrendered in May 1902.

In the late Victorian era the Empire’s intellectuals were also wrestling with their consciousnesses the ever increasing competitiveness of the global order. The main protagonists which fuelled this apprehensive state of geo-political consciousness were the rise of Germany, United States of America and Russia. The economies of Germany and the United States were seen as threats because they were more than just challenging British industrial supremacy. In 1870 the United Kingdom had more than the upper hand when it came to ‘world manufacturing production’ with 31.8% against 23.3% for the United States and 13.% for Germany. By the end of 1885, it was 26.6%, 28.6% and 13.9% respectively and at the start of the new century (1900) the United States had clearly surpassed the UK, 30.1% to 19.5% respectively with Germany on the heels of the latter with 16.6%.[21] The trajectory was brutally clear: Great Britain was in relative economic decline.[22]While Tsarist Russia on the other hand was seen not so much as a direct economic threat to the Empire but as a nation with impossible intentions towards ‘British India’. The Indian uprising of 1857 and its subsequent repression disinvested the Empire of any notion that its rule there was attuned to the willing consent, as hitherto believed, of the indigenous population.[23] The British pillage and impoverishment of India also had reached its zenith in the late Victorian era. The main periods of this impoverishment were the famines of 1876-79, 1889-91 and 1896-1902. In the midst of these famines British imperialism exported foodstuffs from India to the United Kingdom – “Londoners were in effect” argued the historian, Mike Davis, “eating India’s bread.”[24]Russia, it was feared, may tap into Indian resentment towards the Empire, agitate the masses and with their help dislodge British imperialism from its prized possession.

The challenges posed by this triad of Germany, United States and Tsarist Russia “led to a reappraisal of Britain’s global role and spurred the development of a mosaic of schemes for colonial unity.”[25] Initially intellectuals perceived and wished to bring forth a “Greater Britain” as a “bulwark” against the new rising powers. This construct would be a new federal state consisting of the United Kingdom and its white settler colonies in North America (i.e. Canada), Oceania (Australia and New Zealand) and the colonies in Southern Africa. Together they would be united in a federal parliament and hold its own in an ever more economically and militarily competitive world.

However, even this theoretic project failed to alleviate the gloom of what they perceived to be the coming dark clouds of Time. The formulae of Time for Empire they rightly reasoned determined that they rise and fall and the “ancients seemed to teach little” with regard to imperial preservation. Yet these intellectuals knew the “empire had to escape the clutches of time…” or more accurately imperial time, circular time which has been the destiny of all previous empires. [26] Although British intellectuals identified their Empire with ancient Rome they didn’t want it to end in ruin like Rome.[27] As with Rome in its pomp, the British Empire for the moment was militarily incomparable and as such had no need of allies.

This incomparability allowed the Empire to have an ‘isolationist’ foreign policy. This isolationism is not to be mistaken with the legend of American isolationism which is rooted in their ‘founding fathers’ theoretic instruction not to become entangled in foreign affairs. British isolationism (or ‘splendid isolation’ as historians grandiosely refer to it) in the latter part of the Victorian era is not rooted in any principled or idealistic notion of abstaining from foreign adventurism but in the fact that the Empire during peace time had no need of allies. No other nation, Power or imperialist pretender could directly threaten the essence of the British Empire. Britannia was a modern Rome. It ruled the waves. However, from studying other previous Empires, they knew this superiority wasn’t to be indefinite. The writing was not so much on the wall, but in the history books. Relative economic decline further fuelled this foreboding.  As the historian Niall Ferguson wrote in his bestseller, “Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World”, the British, “knew too much ancient history to be complacent about their hegemonic power…there were many who looked forward uneasily to the decline and fall of their own empire, like all the empires before it.”[28]

At this point, a point determined by the ‘uneasiness’ of economics, the rise of imperial competitors and the trajectory of imperial history, the Empire reappraised its geopolitical relationships with other nations. And it was within this context that previous attitudes towards the United States of America were abandoned. Up until well into the second half of the nineteenth century the USA “was regarded with a mixture of unease and disdain.”[29] The reason for this is because the United States had more democratic rights for its (white) citizens and it defined itself as apart from the British Empire and the rest of Europe. The military and political concept and alliance we today understand as an American led “West” did not gain traction until after World War Two when a face-off with the Soviet Union “East” became more pronounced.

Furthermore, as the past gave no reassurances that a “Greater Britain” would be enough for the continuation of the Empire, some intellectuals, “sought authority in the image of America. This move was the result of the perceived consequences of understanding empires as transient, temporary, and above all, self-dissolving. In order to defend a permanent global Anglo-Saxon polity, they tried to escape this trajectory, to anchor their vision in secure temporal foundations. Greater Britain was to be located in a progressive narrative, open to the future not condemned by the past.”[30]

British intellectuals were determined to wrench their Empire from history’s inevitable damnation and avoid the flames that await all imperial hubris. In the interests of self-preservation, comparisons with past empires were cast aside in exchange for “secure temporal foundations”. Specifically they re-orientated “their gaze toward America, shifting the source of inspiration from the past to the present – all in the name of the future. America was to be a substitute…an apposite political structure,..an imaginative means to escape the dangers heralded by the past.”[31] Indeed, the United States was no longer to be regarded as “a potential or actual competitor but rather as a partner in the quest for global progress.”[32]

A common linguistic expression was appropriated to encapsulate this potential rapprochement and future entente. The term “English Speaking Peoples” may today seem innocuous but its contemporary usage is firmly rooted in the limitations of the notion of “Greater Britain” to fend off imperial decline and the wish to incorporate its former colony (and the new rising world power) the United States, into its world view. The essayist Christopher Hitchens was mistaken when he claimed the expression “English-speaking” is merely a “synonym for ‘English by blood'”[33]At the very least, the expression was conceived, according to a British historian, “as a common endeavour in which the historic breach between the United States and the British Empire was to be healed.”[34]

In 1900, the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury relinquished the foreign ministry portfolio he had attached to his premiership and appointed the Marquess of Lansdowne as the Empire’s new Foreign Secretary. Quickly, Lansdowne initiated what came to be referred to as a “new course” in foreign policy which can be seen as encapsulating the zeitgeist of apprehensive imperial thinking of the preceding years. Europe had formed into military alliances and blocs which the Empire could no longer ignore. On the one hand, there was the France-Russia alliance which was cemented in a treaty in 1892, on the other was the Triple alliance of Germany, Italy and Austria-Hungary.

Russia continued to be perceived as a menace and potential threat to Great Britain’s hold on India. It was feared that Russia might take advantage of the Empire’s travails in its cumbersome crushing of the Boers and agitate in India. It didn’t but the United States seemed to notice the Empire’s position. The Empire, in the late 1890’s, had many disputes between the United States and Canada over trade rights in fishing and fur seal fishing. But the two major disputes were the border between Alaska and Canada and the proposed Isthmian Canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

American citizens had settled in parts of Alaska which Canada had made claims to especially after gold mines had been discovered in specific regions. The United States also wanted to revisit the 1850 Clayton-Bulwer Treaty that was signed with Great Britain in the event of a canal being built across the Isthmian linking the two great oceans. The Treaty guaranteed inter alia the canal’s military neutrality. Initially Lord Salisbury wanted to link the two issues and only concede to the Americans on total claims to the Canal in exchange for American concessions on the Alaska-Canada border.[35]  The Americans refused and insisted on addressing both issues on their individual merits.

Furthermore, with the rise of new imperial powers; European military alliances on its doorstep and most importantly the Empire’s forces bogged down in South Africa the British had no choice but to cave in and appease the Americans. “The war stretched British resources to their limit at a time when public feeling on the Continent was pressing the great Powers to intervene in the struggle to save the Boers”[36] wrote the historian J. Grenville and a new treaty, known as the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, was eventually signed in November 1901. This agreement guaranteed the United States ownership and military supremacy in the future development of the canal across the Isthmian. The agreement surrendered military supremacy to the United States in the Western hemisphere not out of choice, ideology or kinship but out of imperial necessity.[37]

Nevertheless the Empire continued to fantasise about invading the United States. A pre-emptive war plan to invade the United States on three fronts: a land invasion from Montreal coupled with landings on New York and Boston was drawn up. The invasion was to be supported by a prospective Native American uprising who would no doubt come running to the assistance of the British![38] Unfortunately the Empire was never in a military position to materialise this adventure.

The capitulation to the United States was one of the first agreements made by Lansdowne that allowed him to consolidate the Empire’s resources to where its main interests lay, namely in Africa and Asia. Up until 1901 British naval policy was, in theory, based on parity with the two next major naval powers.[39]This policy was no longer sustainable. The rise of new powers and alliances being formed amongst its imperial competitors rendered it redundant and the Empire sought to establish its own alliances. British eyes were on the France-Russian Alliance which had held since 1894. It was feared their combined strength posed not only a threat to the Empire’s global possessions but also to the home waters. Therefore, the British fleet needed first and foremost to account for the metropolis and in such a case this “made it impossible to maintain British supremacy in the Caribbean and Pacific as well.”[40]

Within three months of signing away military supremacy to the United States in the Western hemisphere, Great Britain entered an agreement with Japan in the Far East.  In this agreement the Empire pledged to support Japan in any war with an adversary if a third party became involved. In practise this meant that if Japan and Russia military decided to war and France came to the assistance of Russia, the British Empire would be obliged join on the side of Japan. Japan saw this agreement as green light to expand while the British saw this as a way of checking Tsarist Russia expansionism in Asia and obviously and specifically India.

Amidst the war between Russia and Japan in 1904-1905, the Empire signed the ‘Entente Cordial’ with the French. Both nations were apprehensive about the rise of Germany and entered this alliance as a bulwark against any German expansionism.  The Empire made another alliance with Tsarist Russia later in the decade.

The alliances made and initiated by Lansdowne in his term as foreign secretary held for another ten years and were carried into the Great War or World War One intact. That is the tripartite of the British Empire, France and the Tsar’s Russia were pitted against a German led alliance which included the Ottoman Empire in an imperialist carnage to carve up mankind for their own benefit.

Although the British had the support of its Empire spanning a quarter of the world, even this was not enough to defeat Germany. A media campaign to entice its former colony, United States of America, to assist it in the war began in harness.

The British were in a good position to entice the Americans to win the war for them for four main reasons. Firstly because Americans saw Europe “through a distinctly British perspective. Few American newspapers at that time maintained European staffs of their own; while those that did found few trained American trained foreign correspondents to man them.”[41] Secondly, the British cut off the communication channels between Germany and America therefore all news to the United States was further filtered through the British censor.[42] Thirdly, the British in their propaganda in the United States made out that the interests of the British Empire were also American interests. Some newspapers thought that the Empire was fighting America’s battle and the future of democracy was at stake although Britain’s ally was the autocratic Russia of the Tsar and the Britisher had never instituted democracy amongst the indigenous populations of Africa and Asia it lorded over. The propaganda worked to the extent that “the British captured the American flag and waved it in front of themselves.”[43] Fourthly and most importantly the British economically tied good proportions of the American economy and business into the war with purchases of arms ware and loans and therefore “made American business dependent upon a British victory.”[44] The Empire was eventually “saved from collapse” in the Great War by the United States’s entry in April 1917.[45]

The British imperialist establishment felt no shame or disgrace in endearing itself to a nation it once tried to strangle and crash on more than one occasion. The Empire had attempted to crush the American revolution, it then invaded the United States in 1814 and burned the capital, Washington to the ground and during the civil war the British did all they could do to see a partition of the United States by supporting the Confederacy in all but name. In all three cases the British Empire failed in their objective of destroying the United States. With its imminent economic and military decline foreseen, the British establishment in the late Victorian era shamelessly began to promote potential refuge and security under an American wing. During World War One, the Empire with most of the world’s resources and people at hand, had no choice but to rope in the United States into its war with Germany.

History repeated itself in World War Two. The British Empire found itself up against the Germans again and as Winston Churchill said during his short spell at the Admirality in 1940, it was one thing delighting and entertaining[46] the British populace with slaughtering less technologically developed Africans and Asians (“harmless objects”) and another fighting Germans:

“Indeed one may look back with envy to the past, and to the Victorian Age when great controversies were fought about what now seem to us very minor matters. When great states fought little wars and when the pugnacious instincts of our people were satisfied with such comparatively harmless objects as Cetewayo, the Mahdi, President Kruger and the Mad Mullah – I mean the the Mad Mullah of Somaliland.” [47]

An unrepentant racist and imperialist, Winston Churchill is probably one of the most mythologized figures in modern history. Most Americans have a ludicrously positive image of the man, inculcated via many anglophilic Hollywood films.

The “Empire alone could not have won the Second World War”[48] wrote Ferguson and as late as 1927, Churchill had even contemplated the Empire waging war on the United States[49] but when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour in 1941, Britain’s greatest ever hero literally danced and jigged. He knew the American entry into the war would guarantee his and British imperialist survival. The Empire was saved from behind an American command, like the vernacular, despicable playground bully who when a more revolting bully arrives on the scene scurries behind a stronger saviour. Thereafter, the United States declared war on Japan and only after Germany and Italy declared war on the United States in solidarity with their Japanese ally, did the Americans, several days later declare war on the fascists of Europe.

There is nothing naturally inevitable about the current alliance between the United Kingdom and the United States of America. It was disingenuous of Christopher Hitchens to argue that the origins of the current geo-political relationship between the United States and the British state is to be “sought in the grand triad of race, class, and empire – the trivium upon which the relationship rests”,[50] when in fact it is to be actually, empirically and corroboratively found in British imperialism’s global economic and military decline or as the Brooklyn hip-hop artist Nasir rapped “All the wrong doers have got it coming back to ’em, a thousand times over. Every dog has its day and everything flips around. Even the most greatest nation in the world has it coming back to ’em.”

If India in 1857 had successfully emulated the United States and thrown off the shackles of British imperialism the British Empire’s decline would have clearly happened much sooner as there would not have been a guaranteed market for its goods, foodstuffs to plunder for its own people or an Indian auxiliary army used to defend the empire and subjugate other nations. Although the Empire could throttle and crush the Indian nation and other parts of the world in the latter part of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, it could not prevent the challenge and rise of the United States, Germany and other European powers. It is within this decline of imperial power coupled with the rise of other nations that today‘s alliance of the United Kingdom with the United States originates. The fanciful and appropriated expression “English-Speaking Peoples” is a linguistic masquerade of this imperial decline and an “implicit” acknowledgement that British imperialism and with it the British establishment would not survive without the power of the United States.[51]

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