The Empire of Progress

West Africans, Indians, and Britons at the British Empire Exhibition, 1924–25

D. Stephen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137325129
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia británica

This much-needed study of the British Empire Exhibition reveals durable, persistent connections between empire and domestic society in Britain during the interwar years. It demonstrates that the Exhibition was a marker of how by 1924, imperial relations were increasingly likely to be shaped by forces located on the colonial periphery.

1

“Developing the Family Estate”

The final acts in building the British Empire Exhibition before the gates officially opened to the public were opening ceremonies held at the Empire Stadium, culminating in a speech by George V. The monarch spoke about “developing the family estate” in a carefully worded statement sent out via radio and telegraph to “the nation” and “the empire.” The king’s forecast of a glittering imperial future travelled across Britain, where public audiences assembled to hear the broadcast, but was also telegraphed to India, the colonies, and the dominions. The monarch discussed the empire inclusively as a common possession of the British “family,” his choice of words suggestively recognizing the need to uphold a common vision that presented the empire as a solution to Britain’s declining economic and political influence while offering “progress” and “development” to sympathizers in India and the colonial empire.1 The exhibition’s opening was the culmination of five years of organizing work that brought various components of the empire into closer communication. This chapter traces the exhibition from its background and early stirrings in imperial politics and experiences of the war to the opening of the fairground on St. George’s Day in 1924. An examination of preparations for the exhibition in Britain suggests how, during difficult times in the imperial “mother country,” the exhibition promoted India, the colonies, and the dominions as patriotic emblems and solutions to both Britain’s lack of industrial competiveness and mounting fears of “national decline.”

The British Empire Exhibition brought domestic society into interaction with the empire during the early 1920s, a period of contrasting trends: unemployment and labor unrest, gender conflict, postwar trauma, and social instability counterbalanced by democratic progress, feminist advances, and rapidly rising standards of living for employed workers and their families.2 The exhibition marked the contribution of the empire to the defeat of Germany and its allies, but victory had to be reconciled with accelerating economic problems, Britain’s declining international influence, and the difficulties of absorbing traumas resulting from the war and a massive influenza pandemic that coincided with the last year of the conflict.3 During the war British merchants and manufacturers lost important foreign markets, the government sold assets and took out foreign loans, and the United States surged ahead, replacing Britain as the world’s leading economic power. The world economy had been disrupted, and after the war economic recovery was uncertain, but the empire still seemed to most Britons firmly under their nation’s control and a reminder of past preeminence. The empire had helped Britain win the war; now India, the colonies, and the dominions would help “win the peace” by giving Britain the means to revive from the economic setbacks of the war, during a time in which European recovery seemed uncertain, and to successfully compete with foreign rivals, including the United States.

British exhibitions held since the mid-nineteenth century had showcased industrial might, a tradition replicated at Wembley’s “palaces” of industry and engineering. These promoted the interests of the older industries but also drew attention to expanding new ones such as electrical engineering and automotive manufacturing, which tended to be located in the southern and eastern portions of the country. However, the “new” industries were geared toward production for domestic markets, while much of Britain’s export-oriented manufacturing base was badly uncompetitive. Coal mining, ship building, and textiles, three of Britain’s traditional staples that had underpinned global expansion during the nineteenth century, were lavishly displayed in fairground “palaces” and a model coal mine, but in reality they occupied a greatly reduced position, unable to keep pace with new plants in rival foreign nations. While Britain’s new industries were creating employment in London and the south, factories in the heartlands of the industrial revolution were shedding tens of thousands of jobs, creating massive, entrenched unemployment in northern industrial communities, in the coal fields of southern Wales, and in industrial Scotland, with attendant social conflict, poverty, and public disorder. Unemployment stood at least 10 percent every year from 1923 until the start of the Second World War.4 It is perhaps unsurprising that tropical colonies began to take on a new emphasis at the British Empire Exhibition as the Federation of British Industries, the Board of Trade, and groups representing private commercial interests held up Nigeria and other large colonies as examples of potential markets and guaranteed sources of cotton and other raw materials that might benefit Britain’s ailing industrial base if given enough stimulation through British investments and new imperial trade.

Colonial governments advertising at Wembley wanted to demonstrate “progress” taking place inside their territories, and they often wished to suggest avenues for new investments. Colonial investments would also function as an indirect stimulus for British industries, a form of “development” that might also appeal to loyalists in India and colonial territories who saw Britain as a source of capital financing, new technologies, and business. In attempting to go down this path, organizers wanted to transcend a history of unrealized imperial ambitions stretching back to the late nineteenth century. In particular, Joseph Chamberlain, an ambitious colonial secretary from 1895 to 1903, had proposed that the British government lead an expansionist program of colonial investments designed to “unlock” the economic potential of tropical colonies, reversing Britain’s declining industrial and economic competiveness.5 Chamberlain, speaking before the House of Commons in 1893, proposed to make colonies more profitable through state-led investments in colonial infrastructure, a program he compared to the “improving landlords” of the eighteenth century: “We are landlords of a great estate; it is the duty of the landlord to develop his estate.”6

Roads had stitched together the Roman Empire, railroads would do the same for the British Empire, Chamberlain argued. Private investors and the British government should lead a program of railroad building in each colony. Public expenditure would be relatively small; would bring immediate benefits to British locomotive manufacturers, steel producers, and coal exporters; and would provide employment for working-class Britons.7 A program of “constructive imperialism,” or government-led development, would be especially important in tropical regions that had so far not progressed under British control. Chamberlain found his plans blocked by the Treasury and opposition within the Cabinet, but small development projects were carried out under the sponsorship of the Colonial Office, including a railroad linking Lagos to Northern Nigeria.8 Chamberlain resigned from government in 1903 in order to lead the Tariff Reform League and campaign for imperial preference, a program of protectionism designed to stimulate trade by tying Britain more firmly to the empire through preferential commerce. Chamberlain campaigned also on behalf of a popular imperialism; Britons were “sons of Empire” and public life was “ennobled” through imperial connections, as empire allowed Britons to rise above partisan “factionalism.” The empire could not be allowed to drift but needed to be addressed through deliberate imperial policies. Chamberlain believed that propaganda such as “magic lantern” shows (slideshows) and popular journalism would help to overcome reluctance on the part of voters to support modifications to free trade that were necessary, in his view, to link the empire together more firmly.9

Chamberlain’s energetic campaigning on behalf of preferential trade divided Conservatives and contributed to the historic defeat of Prime Minister Arthur Balfour in the general election of 1906, helping to seal the Liberal Party’s control of the prime minister’s office for the next 16 years. While some working-class voters in the cotton districts rallied to Chamberlain’s call, most stuck to a belief that lower food prices were a leading benefit of Britain’s adherence to international free trade, and they associated Chamberlain’s support for imperial preference with the “dear loaf”: more expensive food. The Conservative Party lost the initiative in politics, but in spite of political disasters, Chamberlain retained a popular base of support, and key ideas not only survived the First World War but gained ground inside the Conservative Party as a result of the conflict.10

Popular imperial societies were multiplying in the early twentieth century. For example, the British Empire League, which initiated the British Empire Exhibition in 1919, was heir to an older Imperial Federation League that had broken up in 1893 over controversies regarding the constitutional position of the increasingly independent white dominions. During the 1890s the British Empire League established branches across Britain as well as Canada and Australia, but the London branch retained international preeminence. Though the British Empire League was officially “nonpartisan” and maintained neutrality on the issues of tariff reform and imperial preference, much of the membership of the older Imperial Federation League was grafted into the newer group, giving the British Empire League a ballast on the imperialist and unionist right of British politics, though fluid enough to include Sir Edward Grey, a prominent Liberal. In 1903 the group had passed a resolution to hold “an exhibition of the industries, produce, and manufactures of the Dominions beyond the seas” but had been unable to fulfill this intention at that time due to the high cost of sponsorship and the group’s inexperience in organizing such a large public undertaking.11 Presidents of the British Empire League included Lord Derby and Lord Sydenham as well as the Duke of Devonshire, and Bonar Law, Grey, and Arthur Balfour served as vice-presidents.12

The Tariff Reform League was tied more closely to Chamberlain and continued to favor Chamberlain’s views on imperial preference and colonial development after his political eclipse. By 1914 their membership had grown to 250,000 members. Though the Tariff Reform League disbanded after the First World War, its work was continued by Leopold Amery, Neville Chamberlain, and Sir Henry Croft through the Fair Trade Union, a group that later became the Empire Industries Association, and the British Commonwealth Union, successor organizations that emerged during the 1920s.13 The Victoria League, founded in 1901, conducted extensive educational activities aimed at youth and schools, girl guides and boy scouts, in order to disseminate accurate knowledge about the dominions, and remained active at the time of the British Empire Exhibition.14 According to Andrew Thompson, groups that attempted to mobilize voters behind imperial causes such as the Victoria League, the Navy League, the Primrose League, and the Tariff Reform League were not genuinely democratic organizations but part of a structured political environment dominated by the provincial urban middle classes. These groups struck deep roots in popular politics as they campaigned for imperial causes across political, geographic, and social divisions.15 After the First World War, the British Legion and other veterans’ organizations became involved in imperial causes and helped mobilize support for the British Empire Organization within local communities.16 By contrast with the populist politics of these groups, the Round Table movement was an organization founded by Cecil Rhodes that sought to coordinate the activities of sympathetic elite men in positions of public influence in Britain, the United States, and the dominions. Though the Round Table movement did not have a popular membership, it did enjoy an influence in British and imperial media through its connections with the Times, especially after 1922 as the Times came under the ownership of the Astor family, a factor that may have encouraged the highly favorable coverage of the British Empire Exhibition afforded by the Times.17

The First World War has often been seen as marking a rupture or discontinuity in British culture, but war helped to link the imperial politics of the Wembley exhibition to older ideas associated with Chamberlain and imperial societies.18 At the end of 1916 Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George united cross-party factions into a governing coalition and promoted leading imperial advocates to key positions. These included Alfred Milner, whose opposition to Liberal reforms had left him on the margins of politics before 1914 but who now enjoyed a seat in the Imperial War Cabinet. In 1913 Milner had attempted to organize a British Empire Exhibition in cooperation with Lord Strathcona, a former high commissioner of Canada. This venture, similar to the 1911 Festival of Empire, which had been organized by the private impresario Imre Kiralfy, would have been organized by Milner, Strathcona, and their allies to advance interimperial cooperation and trade along more “serious” lines than Kiralfy’s spectacles, which contained a lot of fairground and circus elements.19 Had Milner and Strathcona succeeded, the British Empire Exhibition would have been held in 1915 to coincide with a scheduled imperial conference. An organizational meeting was held at Mansion House, but war canceled Milner’s plans. Nevertheless, at the end of the conflict Milner was appointed colonial secretary, a position from which he was able to encourage the Wembley exhibition.

The war helped the careers of leading imperial statesmen and stimulated an interest in tropical colonies as potential suppliers of war material. In 1917 German U-boats cut Britain off from vitally needed food supplies during a period of “siege economics,” and Parliament discussed colonial resources, real and potential. India was an important supplier, but West Africa was geographically closer, already shipped out peanuts, cocoa, palm oil, tin, and other goods in quantity, and might potentially become an important source of timber, food, and other vital supplies. A flurry of popular pamphlets and newspaper articles speculated about Africa’s alleged future capacity to supply Britain, to create new markets that would help replace lost trade with Germany, and even to generate revenue for paying Britain’s war debts. Chamberlain died immediately before the start of the conflict, but from 1917 politicians and the press contemplated imperial protectionism anew and speculated about “vast, untapped” resources in sub-Saharan tropical Africa and other parts of the empire.

A series of parliamentary reports examined proposals for “developing” colonial assets. These included a report published by the Faringdon Committee in August 1916, an interim report from the Balfour of Burleigh Committee on Commercial and Industrial Policy in February 1917, and a report authored by the Dominions Royal Commission published in March 1917. As a result of the new interest in colonial development, an Empire Resource Development Committee was set up by Parliament and met from 1916 to 1920, and a short-lived Colonial Development Committee was organized under the auspices of Milner at the Colonial Office in 1919. These reports were based on the idea that tropical colonies were a source of potential mineral and agricultural wealth, and that the wartime expansion of governmental powers might provide Britain with the means to exploit these possibilities.20 Henry Wilson-Fox, writing on behalf of the Empire Resource Development Committee, combined realism about Britain’s economic disadvantages in the postwar international situation with a romantic view of tropical colonies: “Looking into the future we can visualize the State as an owner of vast herds of cattle Overseas raised on lands which are today unutilized; as a proprietor of forests and valuable plantations of tropical shrubs and trees grown on areas which are still virgin; as the harnesser of mighty waterfalls fed by the eternal snows of India and Africa; as an organizer of great commercial air services; and as the reaper on an immense scale of the manifold harvest of the seas.”21

Feverish speculation about colonial resources in Africa and other territories diminished rapidly after the war, partly due to the relaxation of government control of the economy and the rapid return to laissez-faire but also as British attempts to expropriate and control land in West Africa had already failed in the 1890s and 1910s due to a coalition of interests including traditional rulers and an Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society led by the nationalist leader Herbert Macaulay. Experiments in plantation agriculture on West African soil after 1918 also faced hostility from nationalists and existing commercial enterprises and were similarly unsuccessful.22 Nevertheless, conjecture about how state-led exploitation of resources from tropical Africa could shore up Britain’s lagging postwar economy continued among a minority of politicians, surfacing in the early 1920s around an Empire Timber Exhibition funded by the Treasury and in a larger and more developed form at the British Empire Exhibition.

After 1916 the British government took a more aggressive posture toward international trade and began to alter the traditional British position with respect to government participation in commercial fairs and exhibitions. Political leaders saw commercial fairs as necessary for stimulating export trade in a competitive international environment—part of a general turning toward advertising on the part of businesses. In the past, the British government generally had less in...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Permissions Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1: “Developing the Family Estate”
• 2: Building the Exhibition in India and British West Africa
• 3: Representing Modern Changes in India and Sub-Saharan Tropical Africa
• 4: Imperialism for the People
• Conclusion: Winding up Wembley
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography