Pax Britannica

Ruling the Waves and Keeping the Peace before Armageddon

B. Gough

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137313157
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book by world-expert Barry Gough examines the period of Pax Britannica, in the century before World War I. Following events of those 100 years, the book follows how the British failed to maintain their global hegemony of sea power in the face of continental challenges.

1

Defining Pax Britannica

This is the history of an idea as much as it is an account of the practice of exerting power. Inasmuch as it bears partly on matters of intellectual history it is really, when you think of it, a form of biography “of the means whereby ideas are formed by men, are applied to their daily affairs, and are changed in that process of application”.¹ During its most potent years, its adherents, proponents or critics did not call Pax Britannica that. It had no currency in its most formative years. It is a term with retrospective associations. Only late in that epoch did it come to be called that. At the outset of the period, 1815, the practitioners were far too preoccupied with reorganizing an efficient system of global influence and reach to presume that they had come to a state of Pax Britannica. They were, too, mindful of the possible resurgence of those two powers with which they had recently fought major wars: France and the United States. It may be kept in mind that towards the end of Pax, those two powers became complicit or actual allies of Great Britain and the British Empire. They, too, had gone through long changes and accommodations to British power. Throughout most of the years here under consideration, the British contended with the rivalry of these two foreign powers and did so with others of intractable character – Holland in the 1820s in Southeast Asia, Spain in regard to slavery and its nest in Cuba, and Belgium in equatorial Africa in humanitarian matters. Russia, with its interests in the Eurasian heartland, was never far from British strategic postulations.

Only when well into the game, so to speak, did the British become conscious of the unique state of affairs that they possessed in regards to world power and world influence. At that stage they were able on the basis of hardwon experience and success to laud and magnify their rule of law. They were in a position resoundingly to preach legal trade, to advance human and civil causes, to preach the end of slavery and piracy, and to advance a system of peace that they hoped would endure forever. They were mistaken in the latter: it was beyond them, and they were sadly overtaken by events. But in these late years of appreciating their power and of fearing that it might someday decline, they were conscious of a state of affairs that they believed existed during the Roman Empire – a Pax Romana.

It was a storied construction based deeply in the history of the British Isles and of seaborne ventures overseas. It was a record of wars successfully carried to conclusion, of heroes and of ships, of difficulties overcome, and of fights for freedom against enemies and states regarded as tyrants and demigods. It was written like a code of the nation, the credo of the policy-makers. It bore the mantle of divine direction.

When Britain first, at Heaven’s command,

Arose from out the azure main,

This was the charter, the charter of the land,

And guardian angels sang this strain:

‘Rule Britannia, Britain rule the waves;

Britons never will be slaves!’

James Thomson

Pax Britannica, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, means the peace imposed by British rule – that is, the practice of implementation of it. Put differently, Pax was a system of force from which, it was argued by its practitioners and propagandists, devolved the benefits of peace. Peace for the purpose of profit was one such benefit, and it hastened the free-trade movement. Humanitarian advancements, the attempted elimination of piracy and slavery, and the propagation of Christianity and education also derived from Pax. The British Empire of the nineteenth century was based as much on the official use of violence as it was on seaborne trade and industrial leadership. The high-minded aspirations of colonial secretaries, governors and consuls for sustaining Pax, or of increasing its influence, were only as good as the forces readily available and the willing cooperation of native rulers and allied states.

In the strictest terms of international law, peace constitutes the normal state of relations in international society. To the student of the history of the British Empire, this may well appear to be a curious definition. For as the historian Sir John Seeley explained in his Expansion of England (1883), the eighteenth-century additions to British dominions were acquisitions by conquest. The empire was won by the sword and kept by the sword. It was not acquired in a fit of absentmindedness, for when Seeley said that he was merely attempting to get our attention by a deceit or slight of hand. For a variety of reasons the empire had grown despite many intentions to the contrary. Acquisitions won by the sword were often returned to the defeated party at the peace, so as to encourage stability and prevent renewed rivalry in those parts of the world. Britain could well afford to return many conquests at the peace table, all the while retaining those places won by the sword the increased the strength and security of the empire and its trade. As of 1815 an altogether unimagined state of affairs had been entered into: the fruits of hard-earned victory now presented themselves. A look at the reason for rationales for keeping or discarding acquisitions of war helps to explain the motivations of Pax Britannica. Military advantage had to be coupled with diplomatic effort – two sides of the same foreign policy, as it were.

By 1815, Britain possessed a worldwide empire based on certain communications points, or nodes, some of them of obvious commercial advantage, all of them of strategic merit. Most of these “keys”, according to the Secretary of State for Foreign Relations, Lord Castlereagh, gave their possessor military advantages. As such, these had been kept at the peace of 1815 in order to insure British pre-eminence in such outlying spots and beyond. And what were these strategic outposts, newly acquired? Helgoland was retained from Denmark to keep it from being used by a former enemy. Malta and the Ionian Islands, to accompany Gibraltar, strengthened the Mediterranean corridor and the links overland to India. Gambia was reoccupied. St. Helena, an East India Company way station, had received notoriety as the jail of Napoleon, guarded by the Royal Navy and a garrison. The British seemed alive to every contingency and, taking no chances, Tristan da Cunha and Ascension Island in the South Atlantic were occupied to prevent a repetition of Napoleon’s flight to Elba. Mauritius, Rodriguez, the Seychelles and the Chagos Archipelago increased Britain’s authority in the Indian Ocean. The British gave up minor claims to the fever-stricken French stations in Madagascar. Ceylon (Sri Lanka), with its magnificent Trincomalee Harbour but of scant trading value, was gained from the Dutch. The Cape of Good Hope, first captured then relinquished to the Dutch, was kept once and for all from falling into French hands and was a profitless possession. The Maldives to the southwest of Trincomalee, the Laccadives off the Malabar Coast, the Andaman Islands in the Bay of the Bengal, and Malacca and other trading stations in Sumatra – all were kept to augment British strategic leverage and trading power in eastern seas. In the West Indies, imperial advantage was strengthened in two ways: by the acquisition of St. Lucia, the great strategic prize of the eighteenth century, and by the reoccupation of Trinidad and Tobago, the latter boasting safe anchorages. On the American mainland, Britain acquired a section of Honduras and the colonies of Demerara, Essequibo and Berbice, together forming British Guiana. Newfoundland was a place of longstanding economic and strategic benefit but it required naval protection for the fisheries. Canada² and India were huge continental possessions, but even then in naval strategic thinking they formed enclaves of inference. “The British Empire is an Empire of islands,” wrote Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond, historian and strategist, “islands either in the physical or economic sense”. Practically all of the external trade of each member of the empire moved by sea. And on the safe and unimpeded passage of this seaborne trade rested the profit and power of the British Empire.³

Historical accounts of these accretions to the imperial estate, undertaken for strategic purposes – to give new leverage and to prevent possible enemies from using the same – seem almost lost in the chronicles of the nineteenth century, which focus, unavoidably, on the imperial scramble of the late century. But make no mistake: these early gains gave leverage to sea power and, more, mobility and capabilities of power projection, for one could, and often did, reinforce one another. When reviewing these acquisitions gained by 1815, Brian Tunstall, an historian of imperial defence, observed, with understatement:

As she possessed also bases or stations at Gibraltar, Sierra Leone, St. Helena, Halifax, Bermuda, Antigua and Jamaica in the Atlantic, and Bombay, Madras and Penang in the Indian Ocean and East Indies, no power was in as good a position to attack British trade or territory as Britain was to defend them.⁴

True it was, as Viscount Castlereagh, the premier statesman of his country, informed the House of Commons in 1816. “Our policy”, he said without exaggeration, “has been to secure the Empire against future attack. In order to do this we had acquired what in former days would have been thought romance – the keys of every great military position.”⁵

If military advantage was a burning concern to the British, equally important was the rivalry posed by foreign states, individually or as allies. Britain had not kept everything at the peace of 1815: to France had been restored Martinique, Guadeloupe, Newfoundland fishing rights, Goree, Senegal, Reunion and French factories in India. Java had been restored to the Dutch, and large indemnifications made for the loss of Dutch possessions in the late war. With the exception of a few islands, France and Holland were left with the bulk of their possessions overseas. Those kept by the British were done so for strategic advantage. Not coveting the mastery of the world, explained Castlereagh, Britain had no intention of humiliating France and leaving it with a sense of grievance. At the same time he sought to strengthen the new Kingdom of the United Netherlands, consisting of Holland and Belgium combined, as a restraining force upon a potentially resurgent and aggressive France. In short, British motives entailed the restitution of rich colonies conquered in war. Strategic advantages were trumping old mercantilist connections. No conquered place was retained because of its natural wealth. As Castlereagh put it in commenting on the British, and their policy,

They do not desire to retain any of these Colonies for their mere commercial value – too happy if by their restoration they can give other states an additional motive to cultivate the arts of peace. The only objectives to which they desire to adhere are those which affect essentially the engagement and security of their own dominion.

Castlereagh, explained the British diplomatic historian Sir Charles Webster, was more interested in building a stable Europe than in riveting the ascendancy of the British Empire over the rest of the world.⁶

British pre-eminence in the imperial and commercial fields existed, in part, because of the relative weakness of the contending nations and their empires.⁷ Russia confined its ambitions to strengthening its dominions, securing its rivers and estuaries, and expanding eastwards overland. The French colonial empire had just about disappeared, and the French navy was in a recuperative mode. Although adventurers, traders and diplomats extended that nation’s interests in the Levant, elsewhere the French were in a recuperative situation in the first decade after Waterloo. By and large, Spain had relinquished its colonial estate, while in many of its dominions the return of royal government sparked civil war or mutiny. Only Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines remained, and much of their trade was conducted with the British. The Spanish did not reinvest in their empire, and the previous three centuries were regarded as the draining of Spanish strength rather than one of extractive gain. The old Spanish mercantilist order had broken down almost completely, and not until the mid-century did a Spanish navy present itself as a strong force. For their part, the Dutch recovered most of their colonial empire and set to the firm task of developing as a national estate the eastern archipelago rich in spices. They had to do so against British encroachment in Singapore, but without sufficient naval power they were obliged to allow the British to exploit the Malay Peninsula, use the Strait of Malacca without hindrance and develop trade to China. The Portuguese Empire, now much weakened, survived in an attenuated form, with places such as Timor, Macau and Goa, plus Angola and Mozambique, and above all Brazil, the most productive possession, which separated from Portugal in 1822. Portugal was to quickly come under British influence in the suppression of the slave trade but did not agree to the formal abolition of slavery until 1842. Brazil, to some degree a child of British policy backed by naval guarantee, posed no imperial threat to Britain’s empire; indeed, trade there benefited British commerce.

Taken altogether, British hegemony operated in a vacuum provided by the weakness of its rivals. Only the United States, with its formidable oceanic commerce to all major seas and annexes, posed a threat to British commercial pre-eminence, though here and there the Stars and Stripes posed as rivals or co-associational trading partners to the Union Jack. The general state of affairs as here described – the dominion of the sea – continued until well into the second half of the nineteenth century, when all of these powers, plus the new ones of Germany and Japan, presented an altogether different scenario from those occupying prominent positions in the Colonial Office, the Foreign Office and the Admiralty.

Nelson’s victory over the combined fleets of France and Spain at Trafalgar in 1805 provided a definitive lustre to the Navy that has never really lost its sheen. To add to the public adoration was a faith in the stewardship of the Admiralty, the sea kings of Britain. For a century-and-a-half after Nelson’s death, the public persona of “the immortal memory” has never faded no matter how savagely the defence budgets may cut into naval requirements.

At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Britain remained the only great naval power. “British sea-power, notwithstanding the first year of the war of 1812, had come out of the great European conflict unshaken and more pre-eminent than ever.”⁸ So wrote Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge, former Director of Naval Intelligence and a noted commentator on British maritime prowess at the outset of the twentieth century. Britain had indeed riveted a maritime ascendancy on the world, and had grown strong by war. The fruits of victory were abundantly clear to all, not least to the French. It had not been the British Army that had prevented a French seaborne invasion of the British Isles. As a French encyclopedia writer expressed it, “The Empire of the seas is the most advantageous of all empires. The Phoenicians possessed it in other times, and it is to the English that this apparent glory now comes into sight among all the maritime powers.”⁹ Another French authority, observing the vaunted power of Britain’s maritime influence, put it this way, in shocked awe: “The trident of Neptune is the sceptre of the world.”¹⁰

Britain was now in a position to take full advantage of the Industrial Revolution, and to extend trade so as to enlarge the empire into a world-wise business concern. Britain had no desire to enlarge the colonial estate, but, as will be made clear, circumstances presented themselves requiring expansion. It was a fact of British life that the British fought against imperial expansion in the years of Pax Britannica – and yet the empire grew, and national obligations similarly.

In addition, when peace was declared in 1815, Britain’s sea power “was supreme in all its elements”.¹¹ In addition to the acquisition of bases, already mentioned, in ships of war, Britain was superior to the combined fleets of the world. There were over 200 ships of the line, nearly 300 frigates and corvettes, and some 400 smaller vessels. It was a prodigious marine establishment but only suitable for waging war. The new era meant that severe economies had to be made to the fleet. Many three- and two-deckers were cut down, or “razeed”, so as to make a still powerful gun platform to be manned by reduced ships’ companies. Old brigs were retained, and some converted to steam tugs. Corvettes and sloops-of-war proved to be useful implements of imperial purpose. Some new construction continued but, by and large, by 1830 a far different fleet existed than in 1815. A clerk of the Admiralty, recalling these days, stated flatly that the Navy consisted of

nothing more than a few old but serviceable 120 and 80 gun ships, mainly 74’s and 60’s and too many 46 gun frigates, donkey-frigates of 26 guns, overmasted sloops (the 18 and 16 gun brig-sloops) and the coffin brigs (the 10’s); of the last name, several foundered annually, and hence the name.¹²

The Navy ran the Packet Service, with its enlarging tentacles of a communications empire. The Coast Guard, or Preventing Service, guarded against piracy and smuggling in home waters, seeking means of raising revenue for the state. The merchant marine was the great carrier of the oceans, carrying the bulk of the world’s trade. Britain possessed eleven-twelfths of the world’s shipping.¹³ The carrying trade of the globe was in its hands. The navigation acts continued in force and with them the provision that British seamen would man the vessels. A healthy, expanding shipbuilding industry stood behind the merchant world. Britain had all of the essential prerequisites to exercise influence on and over the seas, to the profit of the home islands and the security of the empire.

Thus, when Britain entered upon a remarkably long era of general European peace, statesmen and politicians became increasingly interested in the longevity of this state of affairs. They earnestly trusted in its continuance if not permanence. The long war against France and Napoleon had been a war of unexampled duration. “Throughout the whole of that eventful period,” recalled Sir John Barrow, a secretary at the Admiralty, writing in 1831, “the attention of all Europe had been absorbed in the contemplation of ‘enterprises of great pith and moment,’ – of revolutions of empires – the bustle and business of warlike preparations – the movements of hostile armies – battles by sea and land, and of all ‘the pomp and circumstance of glorious war’.”¹⁴ In regard to foreign rivals, Castlereagh contended that France and Russia posed the most likely threats in the future, and he dreaded the thought of a combination of the two as “the only one that can prove really formidable to the liberties of Europe”.¹⁵ Here lay the basis of the “Two-Power” naval standard. British diplomacy aimed to prevent such a combination, and it suited the country well when in the Crimean War it fought in concert with France and the Ottoman Empire against Russia. Maintaining the Ottoman Empire was a cardinal policy in the early years of Pax but it could not be sustained in its latest years – and therein lay the source of some of the future difficulties leading to 1914.

Now, in the plentitude of peace, British statesmen sought stability among the European powers. Castlereagh worked urgently to construct the Concert of Europe, but in the end it was British interests – and British freedom of action – that most concerned him.¹⁶

The various administrations that guided the affairs of state of Britain and the empire for the first half of the nineteenth century always acted with the greatest of caution, worried as they were that the revolutions that had convulsed Europe and the republican zeal that had developed in the United States and in the new Latin American republics would upset the British order. England had gone through its revolution in the seventeenth ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Prologue
• 1. Defining Pax Britannica
• 2. Empire of the Seas
• 3. Anchors of Empire
• 4. Surveying the Seas, Expanding the Empire of Science
• 5. Informal and Formal Empires in the Americas
• 6. Challenges of Europe, the Mediterranean and the Black Sea
• 7. The Indian Ocean, Singapore and the China Seas
• 8. The Imperial Web in the South Pacific
• 9. Send a Gunboat!
• 10. Anti-Slavery: West Africa and the Americas
• 11. Treaty-Making and Dhow-Chasing in the Indian Ocean
• 12. Darkening Horizons
• 13. The Lion and the Eagle
• 14. The Trident Bearers: The Navy as Britannia’s Instrument
• 15. Recessional: The End of Pax Britannica and the American Inheritance
• Notes
• Notes on the Historical Materials
• Index of Ships
• Subject Index