Great Power Politics in the Age of Imperial Expansion, 1856–99
THIS CHAPTER EXPLORES the forty-five-year period after the Crimean War when great powers of all stripes fell into an intense competition for formal political control over third-party territories. The competition greatly increased the level of tension in the system, even if most of the struggles stopped short of a direct great power war. Most significantly, of course, we see France, Britain, and Germany dive into a scramble for colonial territory after 1880 that drew most of Africa and large parts of Asia into the European orbit. On two particular occasions—the Austro-Prussian “Seven Weeks’ War” of 1866 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870—large-scale war between two great powers did break out. The purpose of the chapter is to uncover to what extent and in what manner economic interdependence shaped the struggles and wars of this almost-half-century period.
I show that interdependence and trade expectations were powerful forces for war or peace after 1870, but much less so during 1856–70. For the first fifteen years after the Crimean War, the diplomacy of the European system was driven almost exclusively by the unresolved questions of Italian and German unification. The consolidations of modern great powers out of smaller entities are rare events, but when they occur their potential implications are so revolutionary that they tend to force all other issues off the table. It is not surprising, then, that the four nation-building wars of this time—the Franco-Austrian War of 1859–60 and the three German wars of unification from 1864 to 1870—had little directly to do with changing levels of commerce between nations. As with other chapters, for sake of completeness and to provide a sense of the relative salience of systemic versus unit-level causes of conflict when economic factors are not at play, I will briefly discuss the origins of these wars. My focus is on 1870–99, when interstate economic variables rose once again to the fore. At issue, as always, is the degree to which any of our theories explain the outcomes for this thirty-year period relative to non-trade factors such as simple power accumulation and diversionary motives for conflict. I demonstrate that the trade expectations approach does a surprisingly good job of capturing the shift to a much more intensive phase of great power imperialism in Africa and Asia from 1880 to 1899.
The puzzling move to “new” or “high” imperialism after 1880 offers fertile ground for the testing of theories of international relations, given that practically every theoretical approach out there seems to have a dog in this fight. This chapter adopts the bold position that only trade expectations theory provides a solid across-case explanation for the new imperialist policies of France, Britain, and Germany after 1880. Alternative theories at both the domestic and systemic level prove to be quite limited in explanatory power: the factors they identify were almost always unimportant or merely reinforced the basic trade expectations logic driving the process. France, Britain, and Germany, each in their own way, were propelled into a new round of imperialism by a growing worry about being shut out of potentially valuable areas for raw materials, exports, and investment capital. France started the scramble for fear of losing trade to the more competitive economies of the other two. French actions in Tunisia and subsequent events in Egypt in turn forced Britain, quite reluctantly, into the game. As this preclusive spiral kicked in, Germany under Bismarck found itself compelled to respond to the other two to avoid being cut off from the current and future benefits of trade with the periphery.
Third parties again operate as critical conditional factors that trigger aggressive great power behavior. Italy’s desire for control of Tunisia compelled French leaders in Paris to jump in and take the country first, even though domestic political conditions were acting as a restraint on French action. Internal turmoil within Egypt forced the hand of Prime Minister William Gladstone, known for his entrenched dislike of British imperial expansion. Germany’s leap into imperialism in 1884 was largely a defensive response to French and British actions, but here too deteriorating local conditions in the Congo and Southwest Africa reinforced the significance of decisive and immediate action. Yet again it was an actor known for his aversion to colonialism—Otto von Bismarck—who found himself drawn into the imperial game to preserve trade access for his nation.
Liberalism and neo-Marxism, with their domestic political underpinnings, have difficulty grasping the rush to colonize Africa and much of Asia. Domestic-level drives for glory, ideological missions, or profits were not propelling the shift to the new imperialism. The French, British, and German governments were reluctant to act, and only did so because of anxiety over the trade door closing. Economic realism is much better on this score: it can tie growing dependence on external materials and markets to the greater need for secure access to third parties. Industrialization after 1860 had moved to a new stage. This so-called Second Industrial Revolution involved innovations in chemical processes and mass manufacturing that greatly expanded the variety of inputs and the ability to realize economies of scale. Any great power’s desire to control the trade system will naturally intensify during such times (Barracough 1964). Yet realism once more has trouble explaining the timing of the new imperialism. Why was there a explosion of imperialist activity in the 1880s and not before? What changed the calculi of leaders to account for the new behavior? Falling trade expectations, rather than the arising of new opportunities for aggression, supply the answer.
I will end this chapter with a brief consideration of some of the key imperialist crises of 1890–99—most important, the outbreak of the South African or Boer War in 1899. These crises show that the maintenance of continued access to imperial resources, markets, and investment remained a critical cause of conflict after the initial scramble for territory from 1882 to 1885. Trade expectations were not fully stabilized by the formal imperialism of the 1880s. The crises of the 1890s, therefore, came out of the instability engendered by the preclusive scrambling of the previous decade.
A BRIEF LOOK AT THE WARS OF ITALIAN AND GERMAN UNIFICATION
The war that broke out between France and Italy in 1859 is easily explained. The northern Italian state of Piedmont, led by Camille de Cavour, sought to push Austria out of northern Italy and consolidate a larger Italian nation under Piedmont’s leadership. Napoléon III of France saw an opportunity to reduce Austria’s strength and grab some Italian territory for himself, so he agreed to help Piedmont achieve its goals. The war of 1859 succeeded in pushing Austria back, and by early 1860, despite Napoléon’s defection from the offensive alliance, all of Italy except Rome and Venetia was brought together as a single nation-state.1
This was a war of nationalist fervor and (at least for Cavour and Napoléon) personal glory. Economic interdependence played no discernible role in its outbreak. But the war did lead to an important treaty that shaped the subsequent nature of global trade. France’s behavior during the war greatly increased British apprehensions regarding Napoléon’s perfidy and thus his future intentions. To help cool the rising tension between the two former Crimean allies, London and Paris agreed to a free trade pact in 1860 that was designed to have a self-consciously “liberal” effect on British and French behavior. Negotiated by Cobden, the arch supporter of the liberal vision in England, and Michel Chevalier, a French liberal economist, the so-called Cobden-Chevalier Treaty tore down many of the existing barriers to trade between the two states. Cobden in particular believed strongly that the pact would give both sides an incentive to stay peaceful (Coutain 2009).
It is hard to judge the degree to which it kept Britain and France from war after 1860. Peace itself was overdetermined: both states were so obsessed with Prussia’s moves to unify Germany in the 1860s that they had good reasons to avoid direct conflict with each other. Moreover, Britain and France continued to struggle for control of West African trade through the 1860s and 1870s, as I discuss below. Nevertheless, the fact that the British-French entente only fell apart in the early 1880s as trade expectations declined suggests that while these expectations remained positive, London and Paris had good security-driven rationales for cooperation.2 The liberal argument, emphasizing trade’s constraint on unitlevel motives for war, also has value, at least with regard to Napoléon and the British-French entente of the 1860s. Napoléon’s personal and domestic drives for expansion were certainly not tempered overall—in the early 1860s, he made a foolish bid to control Mexico as the United States was distracted by the Civil War. But he did avoid challenging British interests directly.3
The wars of German unification, like the Italian wars of unification, were also led by a single individual in pursuit of a larger national dream—Bismarck. Yet with Prussia already a significant state in the European hierarchy, relative power considerations played a much bigger role in the decision-making process. After all, any territorial extension of Prussia automatically increased its overall power in the center of Europe. Economic interdependence between the great powers had no perceptible causal role in the outbreak of wars in 1864, 1866, and 1870. Bismarck certainly understood that the control of the economic resources and markets of independent German states would greatly enhance Prussia’s ability to survive against its larger neighbors, particularly Russia. Contrary to the economic realist approach, though, Prussia’s dependence on these states did not create a drive to dominate them to reduce vulnerability. The military side of offensive realism prevailed instead: by absorbing these states through a series of opportunistic wars, Prussia would increase its potential power base manyfold. It could then use this base as a hedge against future threats arising from either east or west (Mearsheimer 2001).
Bismarck initiated the Danish-Prussian War of 1864 to grab an opportunity to control the long-disputed Danish duchies of Schleswig and Holstein as well as to position Prussia for a future war with Austria. When Denmark’s King Frederick died in late 1863, Bismarck used a feud over succession in the duchies to launch a joint Austrian-Prussian military intervention in April 1864. Austrian joined the attack largely to prevent Prussia from controlling the territory by itself. It was rewarded with control of the southern duchy of Holstein, with Prussia assuming control of Schleswig. As Stacie Goddard (2008–9) shows, Bismarck masterfully neutralized great power opposition by arguing that he was operating within the rules of the system, and that with its liberalizing constitution, Denmark was the true threat to European norms.4
Subsequent events reveal that Bismarck’s sharing of the duchies with Austria was merely a tool to facilitate the next phase of his nation-building enterprise: ending Austria’s control of the independent German states. Austria had dominated the pre-1815 Holy Roman Empire, and after 1815 was still the dominant player within the new German Confederation. To eliminate Austria’s presence and increase Prussia’s control of northern German states, Bismarck needed a war. In June 1866, Austria made the mistake of publicly calling for a final resolution of the status of Schleswig and Holstein. This gave Bismarck the excuse to charge Vienna with violating the 1865 Gastein Convention formalizing the division of the Austro-Prussian authority in the two duchies. He ordered troops to enter Holstein to reestablish Prussian “cosovereignty” over the duchies—a provocative move that led Austria to declare war on Prussia. In the Seven Weeks’ War that followed, Prussia quickly defeated Austria in lightning strikes that surprised all of Europe. Bismarck then negotiated a moderate peace to secure Austria’s friendship into the future. Austria lost no territory, although it was forced to relinquish any influence over the German states. A new Northern German Confederation was formed under Prussian hegemony. Wisely signaling his limited aims, Bismarck left the future status of southern German states unresolved.5 The subsequent war with France four years later would bring these states into a new unified Germany.6
The Austro-Prussian War sowed the seeds for the 1870 war. The consolidation of Prussia’s hold on northern German territories and ease with which Austria was defeated made it clear that Prussia would soon be the dominant force on the continent. The fact that Bismarck refused to compensate France with territories along the Rhine, as he had promised in order to keep France neutral, only made French decline seem more real. As Napoléon’s privy councillor warned on July 20, 1866, “Grandeur is relative. A country’s power can be diminished by the mere fact of new forces accumulating around it” (quoted in Wawro 2003, 17). From 1866 to 1870, the French built their military strength while trying to bully their way to concessions. French demands for control of parts of Belgium and the Rhineland territory served Bismarck’s purpose of isolating France. Britain, Russia, and even Austria by 1870 had begun to see France as potentially an even greater revisionist threat to the system than Prussia.7
Pervasive French fears of decline made it relatively easy for Bismarck to push France into striking the first blow. After a revolution in Spain overthrew Queen Isabella in September 1869, Bismarck lobbied to have Leopold of Hohenzollern, a direct descendant of the Prussian kaiser, assume the throne. If Leopold accepted, Bismarck knew that Paris would not tolerate the encirclement of French territory. He could thereby intensify French perceptions of decline as well as perhaps provoke the French to start a war at a moment when the political and military circumstances—France isolated and Prussia militarily strong—were optimal for Prussia. A reluctant Leopold, through Bismarck’s cajoling, accepted the Spanish throne, and the decision was announced on July 3, 1870. Paris took the bait, with hard-line officials arguing for immediate preventive war. Foreign Minister Count Gramont told the legislature on July 6 that Germany’s action would “upset to our disadvantage the present equilibrium in Europe” and France had to act (quoted in Wetzel 2008, 8). Gramont sent ambassador Edouard Benedetti to Bad Ems, a spa in southwestern Germany, with instructions to tell Kaiser Wilhelm that he must force Leopold to reject the Spanish offer within two days, “otherwise it is war” (quoted in Richardson 1994, 167). With news of French war preparations, Wilhelm caved, informing the envoy on July 11 that Leopold had withdrawn his candidacy.
The crisis seemed to be over. Yet Gramont and French prime minister Emile Ollivier were frustrated that France had been denied its necessary preventive war (Ridley 1980, 561). On July 13, Paris upped the ante in a clear effort to provoke a Prussian response. Benedetti was instructed to demand a public statement from Wilhelm that he would personally guarantee Leopold would never in the future be allowed to accept the Spanish Crown. Wilhelm rejected the demand, but did allow Benedetti to inform Paris of Wilhelm’s “unreserved approval” of Leopold’s renunciation of the Crown (Howard 1961, 53; Wetzel 2008, 10).
Bismarck was deeply troubled by Wilhelm’s concessions. Seizing on a telegram summarizing the July 13 discussions, he edited out moderate phrases, leaving something that implied an unequivocal rejection of French terms. The altered “Ems telegram” was leaked to the press, and by the next day it was in newspapers across France and Prussia. The ploy worked. The French cabinet agreed that this was an unacceptable insult, and France declared war on Prussia on July 15 (Ridley 1980, 561–62). The French had played perfectly into Bismarck’s hands: by making Napoléon appear the aggressor, he was able to isolate France, beat it quickly, and then complete the integration of the southern German states into the unified nation of Germany.
Although the Franco-Prussian War had little to do with economic interdependence per se, it shows just how propelling fears of decline can be in international relations, whether they come from deteriorating expectations of trade or, as in this case, straightforward power considerations. In fact, the Franco-Prussian War is one of those rare conflicts started because both sides perceive themselves to be in decline and want war sooner rather than later. The French understood that the Prussia that emerged out of the war of 1866 would eventually grow to menacing proportions. For his part, Bismarck knew that without the southern German states, the larger German state that he was creating would not have the economic and territorial base for future power against such giant empires as Russia and Britain. In short, while the French concern was of ongoing decline, Bismarck’s worries centered on the imminent peaking of German power that would leave his nation vulnerable over the long term to non-French threats.
The period from 1856 to 1870, in sum, illustrates that when wars are being fought to consolidate the very foundations of nation-states, questions of economic interdependence tend to take a backseat. During these times, causal arguments drawn from offensive realism along with theories of preventive war and nationalism come to the fore. Yet by forging two new important states in the heart of Europe, the wars of Italian and German unification intensified the sense of industrial competition that would cause all great powers to look outward to the larger global economy. In particular, fears in Britain and France regarding the rise of Germany and (in the French case) the imperial strivings of Italy would push these two established states into a competition for the control of the periphery that would drive great power politics for the rest of the century. It is to this competition that I now turn.
EUROPE 1870–90 AND THE SHIFT TO THE NEW IMPERIALISM
The two decades after the Franco-Prussian War were a time of relative calm in the center of Europe, largely as a result of the diplomatic efforts of Bismarck, now chancellor of the new state of Germany. Having achieved his objective of uniting the German states under Prussian leadership, Bismarck smartly realized that he had to project relatively benign intentions in order to reduce European fears as well as buy time for Germany to consolidate its gains and develop its economic power. His overarching fear was what he called the “nightmare of coalitions”—other great powers uniting to fight a coalitional war against the rising German state. He thus worked tirelessly to ensure that no coalition against Germany would form, especially one that included France. His efforts were largely although not completely successful. Through the device of the Three Emperors’ League—formed in 1872 and then renewed in 1881 after falling apart over the Eastern Question—he was able to bring together Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Germany in a pact that upheld their mutual desires for the status quo in eastern Europe. Through the Dual Alliance of 1879 with Austria-Hungary along with the subsequent Triple Alliance of 1882 with Vienna and Rome, he ensured that Austria-Hungary would rely on Germany to counter growing Russian power in the east (see Weitsman 2004). Above all, through these maneuvers and by encouraging France to take colonies in Africa, Bismarck was able to keep France from forming an alliance with Britain, Austria, or Russia. The nightmare of coalitions was thus temporarily averted.
Yet the so-called Bismarckian system saw its fair share of crises and intense struggles: the 1875 “War in Sight” Crisis, the 1876–78 Eastern Question Crisis that threatened war between Britain and Russia, and most significantly, the intense scramble for colonies that began after 1880. I cover the first two of these events quickly, since there is little historical debate about their causes. The bulk of this section will concentrate on the still hotly contested question of why France, Britain, and Germany (in that chronological order) jumped headlong into new, extensive imperialist programs after 1880—programs that led to the gobbling up of most of Africa and certain parts of Asia between the five short years of 1881 to 1886.
The War in Sight Crisis of 1875 was a direct result of France’s remilitarization following its humiliating defeat of 1870–71. France lost Alsace-Lorraine in the peace, and as such, had strong reason for a war of revanche. As France rebuilt its military in 1873–74, German officials actively worried about Paris initiating war once the buildup was complete. As early as October 1873, Bismarck told his ambassador in Paris that “no government would be so foolish if, contrary to its wishes, war had to be considered unavoidable, to await the moment which would be the most agreeable to the enemy” (GDD, 1:2, quoted in editor’s note). In April 1875, to gauge the opinion of European leaders, Bismarck leaked information to the newspapers that Germany was contemplating a short preventive war against France. As in 1870, Bismarck understood that he could not take on France if the other powers opposed him. Fortunately, London and Saint Petersburg quickly lodged their objections. By July the crisis had dissipated, and Bismarck resigned himself to living with a revitalized French state.8
The 1875 crisis is easily explained by the anxieties engendered by France’s quick recovery after 1871 and the threat its remilitarization posed to Germany. Given that Bismarck let the matter drop once other powers objected, it is unlikely he was using the crisis merely to build domestic support for his leadership (although with Bismarck, such internal objectives were often nice by-products of an assertive foreign policy, as we will see). Factors related to economic interdependence had no appreciable effect on the crisis or its resolution. Economic ends related to dependence were not part of Bismarck’s decision making, nor was he deterred by the economic implications of war.
The Eastern Question Crisis of 1876–78 has a more direct connection to commercial issues. Revolts broke out across the Balkan territories still controlled by the Ottoman Turks in 1875–76. The Turkish government’s brutal treatment of insurgents, particularly in Bulgaria, gave Saint Petersburg the excuse it had been looking for. Ever since the 1856 Peace of Paris, the Russians had been wanting to reestablish the position they had lost in the Balkans as a result of the Crimean War. In April 1877, Russia declared war on Turkey and launched a full-scale attack across the Danube, sending Turkish forces reeling. For the British government under Benjamin Disraeli, this was a replay of the crises of 1830s and 1850s over the Eastern Question, requiring a strong British response to deter a Russian takeover of the Turkish Straits, or worse.
Disraeli, like Czar Nicholas I in 1852–53, viewed the Ottoman Empire pessimistically, believing that it could not likely be preserved in its present form. The decisiveness of Russian military victories and extent of the revolts reinforced this perspective. Hence, he did not oppose limited territorial adjustments that led to independent states and greater Russian influence in the region. Yet Disraeli adamantly opposed, as all British leaders had before him, any form of Russian domination of Constantinople and the straits. When Russia imposed the Treaty of San Stefano on Turkey in February 1878—whose terms included the establishment a large Russian-dominated Bulgarian state with direct access to the Aegean Sea—the British thus responded with force. Disraeli moved naval forces into the Aegean and pointedly brought troops from India through the Suez Canal to suggest that Britain was willing to fight on land as well as sea. The Russians, not wishing a replay of the Crimean War, agreed to Bismarck’s proposal for an all-European conference. The Congress of Berlin in June–July 1878 led to the Russian acceptance of new terms that greatly altered the Treaty of San Stefano. The newly independent Bulgarian state would be half the size envisioned by San Stefano, have no access to the Aegean, and be hemmed into the south by a newly created province called Eastern Roumelia, a territory that would be administratively autonomous but under Turkish suzerainty. In a side deal, Britain convinced Turkey to hand over the island of Cyprus in return for Britain’s defensive support of its remaining empire.9
The Eastern Question Crisis, then, ended without another Russo-British war in the Black Sea region. Russian motives for its attack on Turkey appear to be a mix of prestige (the reassertion of Russian influence in the area) and the traditional drive for assured access into the Mediterranean. The British aims were the long-standing ones of keeping Russia bottled up in the Black Sea while containing its overall geopolitical growth. This Palmerstonian strategy, as we have seen, was based on the protection of the commercial value of the Middle East and India to the British state. Disraeli’s opposition to Russia was just another in a long line of British actions to defend its economic and political interests whenever they seemed to be threatened by the growing Russian bear.
Trade expectations theory does a good job explaining British behavior in this case, and why the Russians and British fell into a dangerous crisis in 1878. Economic and offensive realism as well as nationalist arguments do a better job with Russian decision making. Unlike 1852–53, Saint Petersburg faced no immediate threat, and was simply looking for an opportunity to recover territory and assure itself of commercial access to the Mediterranean.
COMPETING EXPLANATIONS FOR THE NEW IMPERIALISM
With this broad overview of European diplomacy after 1870 in place, we can turn to the most startling development of the last three decades of the late nineteenth century: the scramble by France, Britain, and Germany to gobble up most of the free territories remaining in the Southern Hemisphere. In understanding the surprising nature of this new imperialism of the 1880s, we need to remember that for two decades after the Crimean War, the European great powers had been largely disinclined to increase their formal control of large tracts of non-European land. For the most part, European states followed the British lead and focused on the building of “informal empires”: they developed trading ports around Africa and Asia, and protected their trade rights via gunboat diplomacy, but generally refrained from absorbing independent African and Asian states as colonies. There were, of course, exceptions to this rule. Britain continued to annex princely states in India and in the early 1870s occupied Fiji while expanding control in Malaya. France under Napoléon III captured the southern part of Vietnam in the 1860s as it consolidated French colonial domination of Senegal. Both Britain and France, moreover, intensified their struggle to dominate the growing trade with West Africa. Yet compared to what happened after 1880, we cannot help but be struck by the relative restraint of the great powers in 1856–75. British officials in particular seemed relatively happy to keep costs down and profits high through “free trade imperialism,” a term coined by Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher (1961), and even encouraged the formation of an independent Canadian dominion by 1867. With the signing of the 1860 Cobden-Chevalier Treaty, Napoléon also seemed convinced by liberal theory that open markets and trading posts were the best means to promote national economic power. Prussia/Germany for its part captured no colonies, and was led by a someone—Bismarck—who believed strongly (until 1882–83) that colonies were a losing venture that only sapped a nation’s power and vitality.
In light of this, we have the puzzle that has animated historical debate since the late nineteenth century: Why did Britain, France, and Germany suddenly rush to annex almost the whole of Africa and large parts of Asia after 1880, to the point where by 1900, these three European powers dominated the non-Latin-American periphery? Needless to say, hundreds of different explanations have been offered to account for the changed behavior. These explanations can be lumped into five main groups, three at the domestic level and two at the systemic level. In what follows, I briefly summarize and critique these arguments before turning to the evidentiary record for each of the three great powers.
The first group of domestic claims includes any variant of the famous Hobson-Lenin thesis that the European great powers embarked on imperialism because of pressure from capitalist firms suffering from overproduction and underconsumption at home. The thesis contends that as the great powers entered a more advanced stage of capitalism, with finance capital concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer firms and banks, there was insufficient demand from low-wage workers to absorb all the products turned out by highly efficient factories. Faced with unused capacity, powerful business classes after 1880 pushed leaders into grabbing colonies as markets for surplus goods and places to invest surplus capital (Lenin [1917] 1996; Hobson 1902).10 Critical to this “instrumental Marxist” logic is the idea that leaders are not autonomous but rather forced by the lobbying of capitalist firms and banks into imperialist policies (Krasner 1978).
The second group of domestic-level explanations captures those arguments stressing the desire of leaders to divert the population’s attention from problems at home through the pursuit of imperial glory abroad. The development of modern urbanized states in the late nineteenth century created significant class conflict within the main great powers. Traditional agrarian and industrial elites, fearing revolts or electoral victories by the working and peasant classes, used imperial campaigns to unite the population around the glorious nation-state. In this way, traditional elites sought to maintain their hold on power and delay internal reforms threatening their dominant positions. Despite its neo-Marxist emphasis on class politics, this second group of reasons has an important difference from the first: here the political elites are seen as autonomous and acting simply to maintain the existing social order in the midst of significant industrial change, as opposed to trying to help capitalist firms maintain their profitability. Indeed, in the second approach, formal imperialism may be a money loser for most of the firms that do participate. But political leaders believe that it will nonetheless ensure elite dominance at home through the noneconomic appeal of the glorious empire.11
The third group of domestic contentions includes all arguments that emphasize the internalization of nonrational ideological or cultural belief systems, typically among the elite classes. Joseph Schumpeter (1951) famously asserted that late nineteenth-century imperialism reflected the atavistic holdover of aristocratic elites seeking glory through empire. Any claim stressing the use of imperial expansion to promote moral ends such as the civilizing of purportedly backward peoples or spreading of Christianity would be included in this third group (Doyle 1986a; Mommsen 1977). In terms of this book’s main competing theories, it is worth noting that to the degree that factors within either the second or third groups of arguments kick in after we witness a drop in great power trade, the liberal thesis on trade and war is upheld.
The first group of systemic explanations captures reasoning underscoring imperialism’s importance within the larger struggle for military power in the European core. Benjamin Cohen (1973), for example, offers the neorealist logic that under anarchy, states must grab territories to maintain their relative position in the system. Colonies provide direct access to raw materials, and are useful as leverage in the larger economic and political struggle back home. The new imperialism, in Cohen’s view, resulted from the intensified competition within Europe after German unification in 1870. In terms of the theories from chapter 1, this position captures the basic economic realist logic of Waltz and Mearsheimer.
The second systemic approach builds on the first, but emphasizes that the main great powers, as security-seeking states, were worried about the declining possibilities for continued open trade after the mid-1870s. Tariff walls began to be erected in the European system in the 1877–81 period, leading France, Britain, and Germany to believe that it was essential to grab colonies now before the door closed, and they were then shut out of key markets and places for raw materials. A pervasive Torschlosspanik or “closing-door panic” took hold, creating a spiral of preemptive and preclusive actions that fed on each other, until almost all open territories were absorbed into formal imperial realms (Turner 1967).12 This explanation aligns nicely with the trade expectations logic: the intense scramble for colonies was a defensive reaction to increasingly pessimistic expectations about the future trading environment.
In what follows, I show that the fifth approach provides a far better explanation for the shift to the new imperialism than the other four. Yet it was not merely the switch to protectionism in the core that provoked the new wave of colonial ventures. France, Britain, and Germany were also driven by the specific threats to their economic positions in places such as Tunisia, Egypt, West Africa, and South Africa. Hence, while a preemptive and preclusive cycle did break out as one great power’s defensive moves set off defensive moves by others, new tariff barriers in Europe provided only the general context for great power concerns about the future. To explain the specific moves of the great powers, we need to look at the sequence of events and thinking of the leaders as those events unfolded. I show that among the great powers, France bears the largest share of responsibility for what followed. It was French moves to occupy Tunis in 1881 that started the preclusive ball rolling. Britain followed up these French actions with the occupation of Egypt in 1882. Both states in 1882–83 also began an intense struggle to dominate the river access to the Congo region. It was only after these initial forays by France and Britain that Bismarck reluctantly got into the game to protect Germany’s growing trade with Africa.
In the process of supporting the trade expectations argument, I will also demonstrate the weaknesses of the alternative assertions. The first domestic approach has only limited applicability. The worldwide depression that hit Europe in 1873, and lasted on and off for two decades did leave many firms with excess capacity along with a desire to find places abroad to dump their surplus goods and investment capital, and some of these firms did call for colonial expansion to help improve their bottom lines (see especially Darby 1987, chap. 3). But there is one major problem here: the lack of evidence showing that political leaders felt pressured into acting for business interests. Within all three great powers, leaders demonstrated that they were their own persons, and would only act when they saw a larger national interest at stake. The very timing of the imperialist scramble—the fact that it does not truly kick in until the early 1880s—suggests that leaders after 1873 were able to resist the call for colonies and something else intervened to shift their policies.
The second domestic argument seems to do better, especially in explaining Bismarck’s surprising shift to a colonial strategy in 1884. There is evidence revealing that Bismarck believed a colonial policy might help right-of-center parties win the October 1884 elections. The argument, however, works poorly for France and Britain. The big French push for colonies came under the leadership of Jules Ferry in 1881 (the taking of Tunisia) and 1884 (the occupation of Madagascar). Yet Ferry understood, as all French leaders before him had, that a colonial policy was not popular with either the masses or French legislature. The reason was simple: following the defeat of 1870–71, the overwhelming majority of the population and legislators saw colonies as a wasteful venture that would divert attention from the main objective at hand: the reacquisition of Alsace-Lorraine. Ferry thus moved cautiously in adopting an imperialist stance, engaging the public only when he needed funding for his ventures. In the end, his colonial policy cost him his job: the efforts to acquire Madagascar and northern Vietnam led to his downfall in 1885 for what was widely seen as a disastrous waste of French blood as well as treasure.
The British case represents a decisive refutation of the second domestic contention. Britain’s own scramble begins under the Liberal leadership of Gladstone. Gladstone entered into office in 1880 under an anti-imperialist banner that called for a renewal of cooperation via the concert system. He had been known for his personal aversion to imperialism ever since he stood alone against the moral outrages of the opium trade in 1839–40 (see chapter 7). Yet in 1882 he occupied Egypt, and then proceeded to project power into Sudan and West Africa to increase British control of key river systems. He undertook these actions with great reluctance, but felt that he had no choice given the harm French expansionism and local instability would cause to British trade and security.
The German case is the only one of the three that offers some support for the diversionary logic. In fact, other than perhaps the 1937 Sino-Japanese War, it is the only instance in this book where diversionary thinking has any plausibility as a cause of war.13 As I will show, however, winning the fall 1884 elections through colonial empire building was only a by-product of Bismarck’s policy. He had already decided that he needed to protect German trade interests in Africa by the middle of 1883 given French and British actions. By winter 1883–84, he had taken the necessary steps to prepare Germany for a colonial grab. It was only in early summer 1884 that he began to consider using his colonial policy for electoral purposes. The primary propelling force behind his new policy was his declining trade expectations. Electoral politics was only a reinforcing factor, and not even a necessary one at that. In the absence of expected electoral gains, he would have gone ahead with the policy on national security grounds alone.
The third domestic argument—internalized moral and ideological values—is the weakest of all the explanations. Its main downside is that it cannot account for variation across time from low-key informal to all-out formal imperialism. Religious and moral reasons for imperialism were at best convenient justifications for policies as opposed to propelling or even reinforcing factors. They helped elites convince the masses that the destruction of independent societies in the south was for the latter’s own good (a mission civilatrise) and probably helped the elites overcome the guilt associated with their brutal policies. There is little evidence, however, that some sudden shift in deep values occurred of the kind that would explain the jump into expansive imperialism after 1880.
The main problem with the first systemic explanation, as with offensive realism in general, is simply one of incompleteness. The argument captures a basic implication of anarchy: great powers may see colonies as tools to increase their power and ability to control their futures. But there is nothing that varies on the independent-variable side to explain why great powers would keep their formal imperialism within bounds prior to 1880, and then suddenly start subdividing the world. Declining trade expectations must be brought in to show how the level of perceived threat changed in the early 1880s, pushing the great powers into new behavior—the so-called new imperialism.
KICK-STARTING HIGH IMPERIALISM: THE FRENCH CASE
Because France was the first state to switch to more expansive imperialist policies, it is best to start our analysis there. The French sense of a hostile economic environment was triggered by the onset of the severe recession that swept the system in 1873. The French economy was especially hard hit by the global downturn given its technological inferiority and stagnating population levels versus its key rivals, Britain and Germany. Indeed, France’s relative decline had set in prior to the economic crisis, but the crisis only made it worse. Consider some figures of relative power for the five key European states—Britain, France, Prussia/Germany, Austria, and Russia. France’s share of iron and steel production had fallen from 15.4 percent in 1860 (versus Britain’s 66.4 percent and Prussia’s 6.8 percent) to 12.8 percent by 1870, with Britain holding its own at 65.8 percent and Prussia’s share rising to 13 percent. By 1880 Germany would have 19 percent of the iron and steel production, while France’s share was basically flat at 13.4 percent. Population levels were even more of a concern. In 1860 France’s population was 37.4 million, increasing only marginally to 37.7 million by 1880. With Germany’s population bounding ahead, the French population’s portion of the five-power system fell from 19.4 percent in 1860 to 17.1 percent in 1870, and then to 14.6 percent by 1880, while Prussia/Germany’s went from 9.3 percent in 1860 to 15.4 percent in 1870, and finally to 17.6 percent in 1880.14 This demographic trend affected France’s overall growth rates: national income, which had been growing at a modest 1.6 percent per annum in the 1850s–1860s dropped to 0.7 percent per annum by the 1875–85 period (Price 1981, 225).
The pervasive sense that France was becoming globally less competitive was exacerbated by two factors: significant political turmoil at home and the influx of cheap US grain. The establishment of a republic in 1873 only exacerbated preexisting domestic instability. French governments for the next fifteen years were notoriously fragile, often lasting only a few months, and rarely surviving for more than a year and a half. To make matters worse, by the late 1870s, falling transportation costs meant US grain was flooding into France, disrupting local markets in a country still dominated by small-scale agriculture. The deficit of wheat imports over exports, which in the two decades prior to 1878 had never been greater than 14 million hectoliters and had been as low as 971,000 hectoliters, rose to 18 million in 1878 and then 27 million by 1880 (Ashley 1910, 313). The overall trade balance went from a modest trade surplus of 191 million francs in 1872 to a trade deficit of 997 million by 1878, and a whopping 1,565 million by 1880. Given these trends, French agriculture and industry started pushing for an end to the post-1860 free trade system and return to tariff protection. Italy’s and Russia’s new protectionist policies, announced in 1877, reinforced the perception that France had to respond or be left behind. In early 1878, the French minister of commerce introduced a plan for increasing import duties by an average of 24 percent. Domestic divisions held up passage of the plan, but by May 1881 his proposals became law with only slight modifications (ibid., 311–16).
By the late 1870s, this sense of decline helped convince French leaders of the need for a more neomercantilist policy in the south, thereby setting the stage for a full-blown push in the 1880s for colonies. If French products were having increasing trouble beating the British and German competition in Europe, perhaps with more governmental support they might secure new markets in Africa. Beginning in 1877, through discriminatory tariffs and increasing contact with inland tribes, France initiated a concerted effort to restrict British trade along the West African coast. This new policy was a reaction to the success of British products in free trade ports established by British merchants. It provoked a strong reaction in London, and by 1880–81, a spiral for control of West African trade was in full swing (Hargreaves 1966; Hynes 1979). As we will see, Bismarck watched all of this with growing concern, knowing that if Berlin did not act, the door to German trade might soon be closed.
In this environment of growing mistrust of other states’ economic intentions, it didn’t take much to trigger a full-blown scramble for formal colonies. The scramble began with Ferry’s occupation of Tunisia in May 1881. Ferry turned out to be France’s great champion of colonialism—a leader who during two short stints as prime minister (September 1880–November 1881 and February 1883–March 1885) did more than any other individual to set France on a course for imperial greatness. Like Bismarck, though, he had been a strong opponent of colonialism in the 1870s, seeing colonies as a wasteful distraction from problems at home (his particular interest being education reform) (Power 1944, chaps. 1–2).
This creates a puzzle that all theories must address: How do we explain his sudden “conversion” to a procolonial policy? There is little question that he became convinced by the early 1880s that those calling for greater protectionism and a more active colonial policy had it right, given France’s need to compete for markets against the exporting giants, Britain and Germany. In a speech in July 1885, Ferry told the French chamber that for countries such as France, the colonial question was driven “by the very character of their industry, tied to large exports.” From this point of view, “the foundation of a colony is the creation of a market.” Five years later, in retirement, Ferry penned a more elaborate statement of his perspective. Colonial policy was “the daughter of industrialization.” With so many states industrializing simultaneously, great powers must look south for markets for their manufactured goods. The growth of protectionism within Europe had “closed previous markets” and increased competition. Tariff policy might defend French markets, but it was not enough. Protectionism was “a steam-engine without a safety-valve” unless it was balanced by a sensible colonial policy. And with Europe’s consumption “saturated,” it was essential to find new markets abroad (quoted in Fieldhouse 1973, 22–25).
We might dismiss these statements as post hoc rationalizations of Ferry’s colonial policy. But the unit-level explanations for his switch to imperialism have little value. The vast majority of the population and legislators was against colonialism, and both of Ferry’s falls from power (November 1881 and April 1885) were the direct result of the perceived wastefulness of his colonial policy.15 If anything, then, domestic politics should have predicted France’s noninvolvement in the colonial scramble, yet the result was the exact opposite, with France being the primary driver of the process. Moreover, the fact that he had earlier opposed colonialism indicates that his push for imperialism in the 1880s was not arising from some personal drive for wealth or glory. Finally, there is no evidence that Ferry was the plaything of capitalist businesspeople; Ferry was an experienced and self-confident politician who remained his own person throughout the process (see especially Power 1944).
The Tunisian occupation of 1881 was provoked not by domestic pressure, or the pressure of French traders or investors in Tunisia, but instead by the fear that if France did not act, Italy would. In 1878, British officials informed the French that they could take Tunisia as a form of compensation for Turkey’s ceding of Cyprus to Britain. Bismarck communicated his approval to Paris, saying that the Tunisian “pear” was ripe and ready to be plucked. Importantly, the French did not jump at this offer. For both republicans on the Left and monarchists on the Right, it seemed that Germany was only trying to divert France away from its primary task, the retaking of Alsace-Lorraine (Pakenham 1991, 110; Langer 1950, 221). Over the next three years, however, a problem emerged that could not be ignored. Italy was using its large and growing emigrant population in Tunisia to pressure the Tunisian bey—a leader nominally under Turkish suzerainty, but for all intents and purposes independent—to align with Italy and accept an Italian protectorate over his country. The Kingdom of Italy had cast hungry eyes on the Tunisian state since Italy’s final consolidation in 1870. The territory was not simply of economic value; as part of the old Roman Empire, it appealed strongly to growing Italian nationalist fervor (Schuman 1969, 62–63; Power 1944, 33).
As early as October 1878, Italy was warned by the French ambassador to Rome to abandon any plans for a new conquest of Carthage (Power 1944, 38). Yet Italy continued its effort to dominate Tunisia through economic penetration. In July 1880, an Italian commander bought a bankrupt Tunisian railway for four times its value, with the Italian government guaranteeing earnings of 6 percent on the purchase price and on any additional capital investment. This upset even the mild-mannered French premier Charles Freycinet, who told the Italian ambassador that France’s “great interests” in Algeria would not allow another power to establish its influence in Tunisia. Private Italian investments were fine. But when the Italian state involved itself in the development of Tunisian ports and railways, this constituted a “constant threat for us and an inevitable source of conflicts” (quoted in ibid., 41).
When Ferry assumed the premier’s office in September 1880, he initially had no plans to occupy Tunisia; his focus was still on education reform, specifically the reduction of Catholic influence in the schools. Yet in the struggle for concessions in Tunisia, Thomas Power (ibid., 43) remarks, “Italian activities were becoming more menacing.” Three concerns in particular dominated French thinking: the threat to future French investments and trade with Tunisia; the threat to Algeria, France’s economic “jewel in the crown;” and the threat of Italian control of the straits between Sicily and Tunisia. France’s envoy in Tunis acted strenuously throughout 1880 to defend French economic interests. But by early 1881, it was clear that the Tunisian bey was siding with Italian businesspeople and officials on almost every issue.16
As Power concludes, it was the combination of incidents that went against France—all of them seeming to indicate hostile Italian intentions—that finally moved the French government to act. Interestingly, Ferry himself was one of the last of his cabinet to come on board for a formal occupation of Tunisia. In March 1881, he told his foreign minister in a cabinet meeting, “An affair in Tunis in [an] election year, my dear Saint-Hilaire, don’t think of it.” Within three weeks, however, he was prepared to send troops in Tunisia. Ferry acknowledged in retirement that it was Italy’s provocations that pushed him into acting (ibid., 49). In April, using raids by Tunisian tribespeople into Algeria to argue that France had to defend its interests, French troops crossed into Tunisia and proceeded to occupy the whole country. Italy had hoped to get English support to counter a French attack, but when London demurred, Italy wisely chose not to contest the occupation (Schuman 1969, 74–76).
The French move against Tunisia, as we have seen, cannot be explained by domestic-level arguments. Ferry and prior French governments had been reluctant to act on Bismarck’s offer to grab the Tunisian pear. With no electoral upside and a potentially large downside, domestic factors were operating as a constraint on action rather than a propelling cause for it. One might contend that French investors and traders in Tunisia were pressuring Paris to act on their behalf. Yet this pressure had been a constant since the late 1870s and had been brushed aside by all French governments. It was only when the Italian state showed clear signs of seeking to absorb Tunisia itself, first economically and then politically, that Paris moved reluctantly to formal occupation. We may want to blame Italian nationalism—a domestic-level variable—for France’s declining expectations and its provocative action. Yet this still means that it was a factor exogenous to French decision making that ultimately compelled France’s response.17 Trade expectations theory, especially when one brings in Ferry’s retrospective points about the global trading system, is upheld and competing arguments disconfirmed.18
DEFENDING THE TRADE REALM: THE BRITISH REACTION
The British plunge into the new imperialism after 1880 can be covered more briefly, not only because it is more well known, but more important, because it is much more obviously a result of declining commercial expectations. British leaders under both parties understood that Britain in the 1870s was still the world’s dominant industrial state, and so open trade (backed by gunboat diplomacy) was still the most profitable and cost-effective means to grow the national economy. While Disraeli’s time in office (1874–80) did witness the acquisition of Cyprus, it was clear to all that he was acting only to safeguard the current empire, not enlarge it. Cyprus had almost no economic value, but it did serve to protect the Suez Canal along with the valuable trade routes to India and Asia. Britain’s battles with the inland Malay tribes in the 1870s also produced little reaction in European capitals. They were seen as actions required to prevent threats to the existing trading ports of Penang and Malaka.
Britain’s true shift to the new imperialism came in 1882–84, starting with its occupation of Egypt, and this policy change was initiated by Gladstone, the individual who embodied the ideology of anti-imperialism more than any other British leader in the nineteenth century. Gladstone had begun his career as a Tory, yet in the 1860s jumped to the Liberal Party. By the late 1870s, he had joined the radical-liberal wing: Gladstone not only supported free trade but also believed, like Cobden, that a great power peace was possible only if states could reduce trade barriers and avoid exclusive colonial spheres. He had come out of retirement in 1876–77 to oppose what he saw as Disraeli’s immoral neo-Palmerstonian policy—one that notwithstanding the horrific atrocities committed by Turkey in Bulgaria, supported Istanbul over Saint Petersburg. Gladstone’s election victory in 1880 was itself directly a function of his radical liberal critique of Tory foreign policy (Seton-Watson 1972; Matthew 1997).
It is highly surprising and ironic, then, that it was Gladstone’s administration from 1880 to 1885 that, quite reluctantly, led Britain into a scramble for the formal control of territories. The second and third domestic-level arguments outlined above plainly fall flat. Given his victory in 1880 on an anti-imperialist platform, Gladstone was obviously not shifting Britain to a formal imperialist policy to win elections. And his ideological predilections and moral outlook were constraints on an imperialist policy, not propelling forces. Indeed, his active colonial policy after 1881 can be seen as a crucial case against such unit-level explanations, since his behavior was exactly the opposite of what such assertions would have expected.
The first domestic argument, emphasizing the influence of capitalist elites on foreign policy, seems to have some value. As Philip Darby (1987, especially 55–59) shows, there were concerns among Britain’s manufacturing elite that with the global downturn of the 1870s, new markets were needed to absorb the huge productive capacity of British industry. The growing protectionism on the continent reinforced these worries. Moreover, Peter Cain and Anthony Hopkins (2002) contend that Britain’s large overseas investments by the late 1870s in such places as Egypt and South Africa made London’s “gentlemanly elite” highly sensitive to threats to their capital abroad. The problem with such claims is the lack of evidence showing that Gladstone’s imperialist shift was the result of either direct or even indirect pressure from the manufacturing and financial classes. Instead, the evidence reveals that British officials both during Gladstone’s government and Lord Salisbury’s subsequent Tory ministry (as of June 1885) operated independently of the business classes, and acted because of the overall threat to the nation’s economy, not because of threats to particular interests.
It is telling, for example, that Phillip Darby (1987, 23–24, 60–65, 66–73)—one of the few historians to provide documentary support for the neo-Marxist position—ultimately understands where the bulk of the evidence points. British statespeople and officials, he concludes, saw the non-European world “largely through the lens of power politics.” Their primary concerns in the 1880s, he notes, were defensive: to hold on to what Britain already possessed. By this period, Britain operated in an “uncertain world order” where “the increasing political discord and the growth of tariff barriers were seen to threaten the established international economic system and Britain’s commercial pre-eminence.” Chambers of commerce throughout Britain may have made strong public arguments that British firms needed exclusive markets in the face of continental competition. Yet in the end, “probably more influential than arguments about specific interests was the fear of future exclusion.”
Gladstone’s move into Egypt in 1882 powerfully illustrates the least-of-many-evils logic guiding British officials. The British and French had invested heavily in Egypt for decades. By the mid-1870s, the khedive of Egypt, nominally subordinate to Turkey but essentially independent, had fallen heavily into debt. Despite selling the khedive’s shares in the Suez Canal to Britain in 1875, the Egyptian government still owed ninety million pounds to foreign creditors. Debt charges alone constituted two-thirds of the annual revenue (Robinson and Gallagher 1961, 81). In 1876, the khedive was forced to allow his revenues to be managed by an international body run by the English and French on behalf of the European powers. London and Paris directly supervised the running of Egypt’s finance ministry under a system that became known as “Dual Control.” Disraeli’s cabinet was disinclined to act politically on behalf of European bondholders, but did so for the same reason that Britain had been intervening in Egyptian affairs since the 1790s: fear of France. As Foreign Minister Salisbury wrote to a colleague in 1879, Britain sustained its partnership with France to ensure France “[could not] acquire in Egypt any special ascendancy” (ibid., 84; see also Fieldhouse 1973, 113–14).
In 1879, Khedive Ismail fought back against great power interference and dismissed the European financial overseers. London and Paris convinced the Turkish sultan to dismiss Ismail and replace him with his son Tewfik. Unfortunately, the domestic situation in Egypt continued to deteriorate. This was largely the result of French efforts to extract the maximum in debt payments—a policy that overtaxed the peasants and left little for government functions. In September 1881, nationalist colonel Arabi Pasha gained control of the Egyptian state through a coup. Under the banner of Egypt for the Egyptians, he used nationalist sentiment against European officials to increase his domination of the government through winter and spring 1882. Gladstone initially sympathized with Arabi’s nationalism and opposed intervention. If events required intervention, he believed, Turkey should do it, not France or Britain (Robinson and Gallagher 1961, 94–103; Pakenham 1991, 124–28).
The French government, under Léon Gambetta’s ministry, argued for joint British-French action and the exclusion of the Turks. The French feared any Turkish action might inspire a pan-Islamic uprising in North Africa that would undermine their control over Tunisia and Algeria. In December 1881, Gambetta asked London to support a joint note drawn up to warn Egyptian nationalists that the two powers were determined to reestablish the power of the khedive and system of Dual Control. After much discussion, the cabinet convinced Gladstone that the note would compel changes in the Egyptian government, thereby averting the need for a British military intervention. The note was sent in January, but it had the opposite effect: it mobilized nationalist fervor around Arabi, and a nationalist ministry was formed in February with Arabi as the minister of war. London received reports in March–April 1882 from its envoys that Egypt was falling into anarchy, that the military was increasingly gaining the upper hand, and that European lives were now endangered (Robinson and Gallagher 1961, 96–98).
Gladstone was still seeking to avoid intervention, and the new French premier, Freycinet, who replaced Gambetta in February, was supporting him in this notion. Paris, however, was still against Gladstone’s preferred fallback option—Turkish intervention—should things continue to deteriorate. Striving to preserve British-French cooperation, Gladstone agreed to a joint naval demonstration designed to show unified resolve. The French agreed that if the nationalist military officers failed to agree to a compromise with the khedive’s faction, Turkish forces would land to restore order. On May 15, London and Paris announced their plan to the other great powers. But in late May, in the face of domestic opposition, Freycinet got cold feet and pulled out of the plan. Gladstone went ahead anyway and deployed the British navy off the Egyptian coast, yet once again the action only ended up consolidating Arabi’s control. On June 11 and 12, fifty Europeans were massacred in Alexandra and the British consul was attacked.
Gladstone was now in a bind. British and French coercive diplomacy had only heightened instability in Egypt. Cabinet members were coming to see that military action was needed to protect the canal and that Turkey could not mobilize quickly enough, even if it wanted to. This view seemed confirmed in late June when Istanbul indicated its unwillingness to act to restore order in Egypt. By this time, Arabi was assembling shore batteries in Alexandria to counter any British naval attack. The admiral in charge of the British fleet off Egypt asked permission to bombard the facilities if work was not stopped. This set off another round of intense cabinet discussions, with a majority arguing for an ultimatum to Arabi, regardless of whether it led to an occupation. Gladstone and Foreign Minister Lord Granville held firm to their position that Britain had to maintain its wait-and-see policy.
By July 8, the deteriorating situation pushed Gladstone toward action. As Granville wrote a colleague that day, “Gladstone admitted to me yesterday for the first time that we were bound to protect the Suez Canal” (quoted in ibid., 111). The ultimatum was immediately approved, and when it expired on July 11 the fleet began its bombardment of Alexandria. This only produced additional anti-European riots and a call by Arabi for holy war. Egyptian officials still loyal to the khedive, including those in towns along the canal, were replaced by men from Arabi’s camp. In response, on July 20 the cabinet agreed to send an expeditionary force into Egypt’s interior and take Cairo if necessary. Four days later, Gladstone asked the House of Commons to support the operation via a 10 percent increase in the income tax rate.19 He told the House of Commons that Egypt’s internal anarchy posed a threat to the canal zone and it was up to Britain to impose the rule of law. Cabinet member Charles Dilke elaborated. Britain had “a predominant commercial interest” in acting given that 82 percent of the trade through the canal was British. The canal was also the principal highway to India and the Far East, where Britain had “vast interests” given its control over 84 percent of China’s export trade. The House of Commons quickly approved support for the operation.20
In August General Garnet Wolseley landed forces on orders to secure the canal. By mid-September he had assumed control of the whole country. Gladstone promised radicals in his party that the occupation would be temporary, and Britain would leave once internal stability had been restored. Much to French anger, however, Gladstone kept refusing to specify an exit date, and by the time his government fell in June 1885, British forces still controlled Egypt.
The above analysis shows that it was the threat to the Suez Canal that had driven the British to take the country in 1882 (with investments in Egypt a crucial reinforcing factor). Given the importance of the India-China trade, the impact on Britain’s larger economy of losing the canal would have been huge. Such concerns would lead Britain to hold on to Egypt for another seventy years, and it would fully relinquish control only after yet another incursion to protect the canal zone (chapter 6).
The Egyptian question would come to dominate British-French relations over the 1882–85 period, greatly undermining the trust between the two countries. Perceived British unwillingness to give France a role in the running of Egypt and its finances would intensify Paris’s interest in scrambling for trade in the Congo and West Africa. British responses along with London’s effort to align with Portugal against the French over the Congo River system would cause Germany to jump into the imperial scramble in mid-1883. With the Tunisian and Egyptian landgrabs, the scramble for Africa, at least for France and Britain, was officially under way. Yet Germany was still not in the game. It is to Bismarck’s surprising change of heart on colonial issues that I now turn.
SWITCHING GEARS: BISMARCK AND THE GERMAN CASE
In a very real sense, only Germany’s move to the new imperialism remains a puzzle. French and British plunges into expansive formal imperialism in the 1880s reflected straightforward fears about future trade, and were taken despite the fact that domestic and ideological forces were pushing in the opposite direction. The same is not true for the German case. While there is powerful evidence that Bismarck was responding to declining trade expectations, there is also proof that he believed a new colonial policy might help bolster his position at home. Domestic drivers of this policy come in two possible forms: his apparent belief that an anti-British colonial posture would reduce the influence of the Anglophile crown prince Friedrich, and his view that such a posture might help pro-Bismarckian parties win the elections of October 1884. In what follows, I first briefly discuss the evidence for a domestic-level explanation of Bismarck’s change of heart. I then show that any domestic force pushing Bismarck was at most only a reinforcing cause for his actions. Fear of having the door shut to German trade as France and Britain scrambled for Africa was the primary factor driving Bismarck. Domestic political gains were at best nice side benefits of his new policy.
The argument that Bismarck acted to reduced the influence of the crown prince goes as follows. Bismarck’s relations with the reigning kaiser, Wilhelm I, were good, but by the early 1880s Wilhelm was in his eighties and expected to die soon. Crown Prince Friedrich had married Queen Victoria’s daughter, and both greatly admired British-style liberalism. Bismarck thus feared that when Wilhelm died and Friedrich became kaiser, he would fire Bismarck and establish a “Gladstone ministry” that would reverse most or all of Bismarck’s state-building policies. Jumping into a colonial empire would allow Bismarck to challenge Britain head-on, raise anti-British feelings within Germany, and make it harder for Friedrich to dismiss Bismarck once he assumed the imperial throne (Pakenham 1991, 204–11).
The main support for this view comes from two comments made after the new policy was already well under way. In September 1884 Bismarck told the czar in a one-on-one meeting, according to Friedrich von Holstein’s diary, that “the sole aim of German colonial policy was to drive a wedge between the Crown Prince and England” (September 19, 1884, in HP, 2:161). The second comment is not from Bismarck, but from his son Herbert, one of his confidential envoys during the critical 1883–84 period. In March 1890, after both Wilhelm I and Friedrich had died, and Wilhelm’s grandson Wilhelm II was now kaiser, Herbert was asked to explain Bismarck’s sudden turn to colonies. He replied that when Germany began its colonial policy, “we had to reckon with a long reign of the Crown Prince” in which British influence would be strong. “To prevent this, we had to embark on a colonial policy, because it was popular and conveniently adapted to bring us into conflict with England at any given moment” (quoted in Kennedy 1980, 171).
This may seem like fairly definitive evidence. Nevertheless, there is good reason to doubt that this logic motivated or even influenced Bismarck’s new policy. Holstein’s diaries do document growing concerns within Bismarck’s ministry about Friedrich’s liberal tendencies and even more so his mercurial, unpredictable ways (HP, 2:passim). Yet Bismarck’s behavior throughout the 1883–85 period when Gladstone was prime minister reveals that his “hostile” stance toward Britain was purely tactical and chosen only to help secure German colonies. After Gladstone proved accommodating in late 1884 when Bismarck needed London’s support against France at the Berlin Conference on West Africa, Bismarck aligned with Britain to further his colonial ends and ensure German trade access to the Congo. If upsetting Britain to isolate Friedrich was his goal and colonial policy only a means, then he should have sacrificed territorial gains to maintain the British-German antagonism that arose through spring and summer 1884. The fact that Bismarck switched to accommodation with Britain shows that this mid-1884 antagonism was a tool to compel London into concessions—one that could be dropped once territorial and trade gains in Africa had been secured.
The contention that Bismarck sought to use colonial policy to win the October 1884 elections has more plausibility. By the late 1870s, there was growing support among right-wing parties for a colonial policy that would challenge Britain’s historical domination of foreign markets. As he came to see the value of selective protectionism in the late 1870s, Bismarck parted ways with his former supporter in the Reichstag, the free trade National Liberal Party. The party itself imploded in 1879–80, with right-wing members aligning with conservative parties and the rest remaining committed to the original free trade platform (Wehler 1985, 74–75). In late 1878, Bismarck used two assassination attempts against the kaiser to push through legislation prohibiting agitation against the existing social order—legislation that allowed him to suppress socialist newspapers and organizing efforts. He then proceeded to ramp up his social welfare program to reduce working-class disaffection and the appeal of socialist parties (see Craig 1978, 144–57).
Despite these successes in neutralizing the parties that opposed him, scholars point to an unexpected event in March 1884 that greatly increased Bismarck’s worry about the fall elections. This was the formation of a new party, the Deutschfreisinnige Partei, created as a fusion of the National Liberals and the Progressives. By this fusion, the new party was now the largest in the Reichstag. And as Paul Kennedy (1980, 171) notes, if it were able to do well in October, the new party might pose a huge threat to Bismarck’s corporatist agenda. In the face of this threat, Bismarck did try to use the prospect of a larger colonial empire through summer and early fall 1884 as a way of increasing the electoral chances of the far-right and center parties, or at least hurting the explicitly anticolonial Deutschfreisinnige Partei. According to Holstein’s diary entry for September 23, 1884, Bismarck went as far as to tell future chancellor Georg Caprivi that “all this fuss about colonies was only being made because of the elections” (HP, 2:163).
Here is yet another statement from Bismarck regarding his motives that seems to confirm that internal objectives were primary and determinative, although two things indicate that winning the 1884 elections was neither. The first is the fact that Holstein’s diary entry from four days earlier is the source for Bismarck’s statement to the czar that the sole aim of colonial policy was to drive a wedge between the crown prince and Britain. So we see Bismarck giving two different statements about his “only” or “sole” aim in pursuing imperialism to two distinct audiences at essentially the same time. For someone of Bismarck’s political smarts, it is unlikely that his use of the words “only” and “sole” were mere slips of the tongue. Rather, the contradictory nature of the statements suggests that Bismarck was following his typical pattern of anticipating what audiences wanted to hear and altering his words accordingly. Caprivi was at this point still in the old Bismarckian mode of seeing colonies as a wasteful diversion. As for the czar, we can imagine that he was highly suspicious of Bismarck’s new turn to imperialism for simple geopolitical reasons. By telling these audiences he was acting only for domestic reasons, Bismarck could hide his larger strategic goal—the protection of German trade—while assuaging suspicions about his puzzling about-face on colonial acquisitions. If his new policy had been only a short-term domestic maneuver, he should have moderated his imperialism once those domestic goals had been achieved after the October elections. The very fact that he hosted a seminal conference on Africa from November 1884 to February 1885 and then worked diligently both during and after to affirm German colonial gains suggests that domestic ends were only a secondary side benefit of his new imperial policy (see Turner 1967, 52).
Yet there is a second, more decisive reason for doubting the “primacy of domestic politics” in this case. Bismarck showed an active interest in securing Germany’s place in the West Africa scramble long before the formation of the Deutschfreisinnige Partei in March 1884, the key event that scholars believe led Bismarck to use colonial policy as a tool for electoral politics. As Henry Turner’s detailed work has demonstrated, Bismarck began to be concerned about British-French competition in West Africa in early 1883, and by mid-1883 was actively inserting himself in the process to protect German trade. Tellingly, given his fears regarding the cost of formal imperialism, he initially hoped he could do this through German naval and diplomatic power. But by late 1883 and early 1884, in the face of French and British landgrabbing and resistance to his demands, he saw that formal colonies had become a necessary least-of-many-evils choice. As Turner summarizes it, Bismarck was a “reluctant convert” to imperialism. He was moved to reverse policy “not by the confident expectation of gaining concrete advantages but rather by a mounting concern about the possible adverse consequences of continued abstention.” If Germany did not act quickly, the door to its future trade with Africa would be closed, at a point when the true value of this trade was unknown but projected to be potentially high. This closing-door panic led many German elites, including Bismarck, to grab now to avoid anticipated losses later. Declining trade expectations were the primary propelling reason behind Bismarck’s radical shift of policy. Winning elections via this policy was a nice “add-on” that arose long after he had changed his mind on colonial acquisitions.21
German expectations of the future were shaped to a large degree by the reports of Heinrich von Kusserow, the most knowledgeable official on colonial affairs within the foreign office. In early April 1883, Bismarck received a memorandum from Kusserow on the secret Anglo-French Convention of June 1882, which had only been announced by Paris in March 1883. According to Kusserow’s report, Britain and France had not only agreed to divide up territory around Sierra Leone but also had given each other immunity from any discriminatory duties that might be applied to foreign traders—an immunity that would apply to the whole west coast of Africa. As Turner (1967, 53) observes, had this been true, it would have been a foreboding development: “It would have meant the imperialist powers were safeguarding themselves from the effects of the growing protectionist movement in the colonial world by trading mutual privileges to the exclusion of noncolonial powers.”
Only eighty years later did scholars show that Kusserow had got it wrong. The British and French agreement promised only to provide equal treatment regarding the protection of life and property (ibid., 53). But in an environment in which France had been imposing differential duties for five years and fighting Britain for direct control of key trading areas, Kusserow’s report seemed more than plausible. Moreover, it came on the heels of a memorandum in early March to the German Foreign Office from Adolf Woermann, the head of a key Hamburg company involved in African trade. Woermann noted that the race to partition Africa was accelerating, and even the Portuguese and Spanish were jumping into the game. The British were trying to acquire territory in the Cameroons, an area where German firms had been heavily engaged. These developments, Woermann cautioned, would be “ruinous for German overseas trade, since all of the colonial powers were increasingly placing obstacles in the path of German merchants.” He suggested the projection of German naval power into the region and acquisition of an island off the coast of the Cameroons.22
That Bismarck took these reports seriously is clear. On April 14, 1883, a German official in Hamburg was informed of the Anglo-French agreement and told to gather information to help Germany negotiate to ensure its merchants were not placed at a disadvantage in West African trade. Among the information Bismarck received back was a strongly worded report from the Hamburg Chamber of Commerce in July stressing the mistreatment of German traders in West African territories already controlled by the colonial powers. The report called for the acquisition by Germany of the Cameroons, remarking that if Germany hesitated, another power would grab its resources and rich interior markets. It was also in early summer 1883 that Berlin received reports that the British colony of Queensland had proclaimed ownership over eastern New Guinea, supposedly in response to rumors that Germany would grab the territory. German suspicions were heightened as well by London’s lack of protection of German merchants stationed in Fiji, an island annexed by Britain in 1874. After a court ruled against the merchants, Bismarck asked in April 1883 for a British-German commission to investigate the issue. Gladstone bluntly told Berlin that the matter was now closed—a posture that could only have reinforced perceptions that Britain was moving away from its traditional policy of protecting foreign traders (ibid., 55–57).
By late summer 1883, Bismarck was showing clear signs that his outlook regarding the role of the German state in Africa had changed. A Bremen trader, F.A.E. Lüderitz, had been pressing since November 1882 for official protection of a trading post he wanted to establish in southwest Africa. Bismarck’s February 1883 dispatch to London had restated that Germany had no interest in “overseas projects” and indeed would only be too happy to have the British extend their “efficacious protection” to German merchants. In August, however, when Lüderitz reapplied for protection of the harbor of Angra Pequena (in modern-day Namibia), Bismarck wrote in the margin of the foreign office’s report on the issue that Germany would “always seek to protect his lawfully acquired rights as long as he is a German subject.” The chancellor also initiated a “cautious inquiry” by his embassy in London of British claims to the area near Angra Pequena. Then on August 18, he informed the German consul in Cape Town that he should extend consular protection to Lüderitz’s establishment at the harbor. In early September Bismarck informed London that Lüderitz had bought land near the harbor, and he inquired as to any British claims to the bay. Any talk of wanting British protection of German merchants was now noticeably absent (quoted in ibid., 57–59).
This new active intervention did not yet mean Bismarck was convinced that Germany must create formal colonies in Africa. At this point Bismarck, rather than seeking a colony around Angra Pequena, was still interested more in getting London to disclaim any sovereign rights over unclaimed southwest African territory. When his inquiry in September on this issue went unanswered, he repeated it with more force in November. The British response was not comforting. Foreign Secretary Granville admitted to ambassador Georg Münster on November 17 that Britain had no specific claim to the southwest coast aside from Walfisch Bay and a few islands off Angra Pequena. Yet the British government, he continued, would see it as an infringement of British “legitimate rights” should any other state claim sovereignty or jurisdiction over the area from the Cape Colony to Angola (quoted in ibid., 62). London was plainly warning the Germans to stay out of an area that it considered an unofficial part of Britain’s sphere of influence.
Bismarck pressed on. In late December 1883, he sent a long note to Münster detailing past British disavowals of sovereignty regarding the southwest coast. He asked pointedly whether the British had installations in the area that could ensure the protection of German citizens. Given that Britain obviously had none, Bismarck was trying to force London to acknowledge Germany’s right to protect Angra Pequena itself. Münster presented Bismarck’s concerns to the foreign office on December 31. London, though, did not reply for six months. To Bismarck, this silence indicated that Britain had decided to grab the coast for itself. His suspicions had foundation. By January 1884 the British foreign office had turned the affair over to the colonial office, which in turn invited the Cape Colony to annex the Namibian coast. That month a Cape official told the German consul of the Cape Colony’s “rightful interests” regarding the coast, and that he hoped Lüderitz’s supposed purchase of land would not conflict with these rights (quoted in ibid., 64).
In February, German merchants sent word that the British governor of the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana) was preparing to annex neighboring Togo. It was learned later that month that Britain and Portugal had signed an agreement giving Portugal the mouth of the Congo River. Britain and France, along with Belgium’s King Leopold, had been struggling for more than a year to determine who would control the river’s vast potential trade. Since Portugal had long been considered a mere tool of British foreign policy, Bismarck could only have seen these developments as further examples of London’s effort to restrict German and French access to prime trading areas. On March 9, an official responsible for Bismarck’s communications from his country estate wrote to Berlin that London had dealt with Germany’s reasonable concerns “not only with indifference but with severity and deliberate injustice.” Bismarck’s own anger was becoming apparent: by early April, his dispatches to his ambassadors were peppered with remarks about Britain’s Deutschfeinlichkeit—its hostility to Germany (quoted in ibid., 64–65; Pakenham 1991, 206–7).
Bismarck’s one remaining concern was the potentially high cost associated with formal colonies. This worry was alleviated by none other than Kusserow, who gave the chancellor a memorandum on April 8 outlining the solution: Berlin could use the old English model for India, granting charters to German companies to run new territories for the state. The state itself would only have to pay for the protection of the firms. That same day, a dispatch from Lüderitz was received again asking for protection, this time noting that based on information from his agent in Cape Town, the Cape Colony was about to annex Angra Pequena. Bismarck bluntly told Kusserow, by this point his closest adviser on the colonial question, “Now let us act” (quoted in Turner 1967, 66–69).
On April 19, Kusserow met with Lüderitz and asked him to draw up a plan for organizing the Angra Pequena region. Bismarck sat down two days later with the kaiser and received his approval to take whatever actions were considered appropriate. The next day, April 22, Lüderitz submitted a carefully worded memorandum—clearly shaped by Kusserow’s knowledge of what Bismarck would accept—that asked for Reichschultz (government protection) for the Angra Pequena territory, but with the recognition that administration costs would be borne by his company. With an implicit agreement with Lüderitz now in place, Bismarck wrote to his consul in Cape Town on April 24 that he should “declare officially that [Lüderitz’s Angra Pequena establishments] are under the protection of the Empire.” Münster in London was told to inform British officials of this declaration (quoted in ibid., 69–70).
Bismarck’s careful attention to the details of his new policy belies interpretations suggesting that he was acting only for domestic advantage. Even as he was plunging Germany into the territorial scramble in Africa, he was formulating a program to minimize the state’s direct costs. This would ensure that the new German colonial empire could remain a going concern far into the future. The fact that the German state after 1884 would end up having to take on the formal administration of new acquisitions only reinforces the point. If Bismarck’s plan in 1884 was simply to grab territory for short-term domestic gain, he would not have spent so much time establishing a base for a cost-effective German imperial realm, nor would he have reluctantly turned to formal empire after the October 1884 electoral victory. Rather, he would have proclaimed a formal empire in mid-1884 and then sought to minimize Germany’s real costs after electoral success. Bismarck had been worried for some time that colonial empire would increase the Reichstag’s power, given that it controlled the purse that would pay for it (Pakenham 1991; Craig 1978). The fact that he would willingly hand over more power to the Reichstag after the October elections in order to ensure the permanence of his colonial holdings shows that he was propelled by fear of the closing door, not by domestic concerns.23
In sum, this section has shown the power of the trade expectations argument relative to two apparently plausible but ultimately unsatisfying domestic interpretations of Bismarck’s new imperialist policy. The most decisive point against the domestic arguments is that of timing. Bismarck embarked on a more forceful defense of Germany’s trading rights in spring and summer 1883, long before we see any evidence that he thought a colonial policy would help him with internal problems. Domestic factors were therefore neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for his actions. Fear of the closing door had already forced a shift in policy before these factors came into play, and Bismarck almost certainly would have continued to solidify his colonial policy through 1884 and into 1885 without them. Domestic gains may have been nice side benefits of the new colonial policy. Who doesn’t want to kill two birds with one stone when the opportunity arises? Yet Bismarck had picked up this stone quite reluctantly, and only because he knew that he had no other choice. For the sake of long-term German power, he could not afford to let Britain and France shut his country out from the future benefits of African trade.
THREE CRISES IN THE 1890s
This section examines three crises in the 1890s that brought the European powers of Britain, France, and Germany close to or into war: the Venezuelan border dispute in 1895, the Fashoda Crisis of 1898, and the crisis over South Africa after 1894 that led to outbreak of the Boer War of 1899. The first two crises can be covered briefly, not only because they have been covered well by other international relations theorists, but also because there is little real controversy over their causes. Scholars agree that economic factors played prominent roles in both, although issues of prestige and great power position in the system were also significant. The origins of the Boer War are much less clear, however, and perhaps because of this, it has been largely ignored by the security studies field. This is unfortunate, since it was the only crisis of the 1890s that actually led a European power into a costly and seemingly avoidable war. I show that Britain initiated the war to shore up a declining commercial position in southern Africa caused by the growth of the independent Transvaal Republic and its anticipated absorption of British colonies—developments that, significantly, were being facilitated by German capital and the Transvaal’s ties to Berlin.
The Venezuelan Crisis of 1895 between Britain and the United States had straightforward economic roots. Britain and Venezuela had been disputing control of the mouth of the Orinoco River for decades. The area around the mouth was not only rich in raw materials but the river and its tributaries also offered access to the potentially valuable markets and resources of almost the whole of northern South America. That the river would be a nice prize for whatever power controlled it was reinforced in the early 1890s by the discovery of large gold deposits near the mouth. In 1894, the British began to extend their railways from British Guiana toward the goldfields. Rumors that London had claimed the region for Britain were confirmed in April 1894 when the British foreign minister, Lord Kimberly, released a map showing British railway lines ending inside the river’s delta.
With both Britain and the United States on the gold standard, and the United States in particular trying to pull itself out of depression through increases in its money supply and through export promotion, control of Venezuela’s gold and markets were clearly of high importance to each. Executive and legislative leaders in Washington unanimously agreed that the British intrusion constituted a direct threat to US economic interests. US anger was fueled by the publication of a pamphlet by a former US minister to Venezuela, William Scruggs, stating that the Orinoco River “was the key to more than a quarter of the whole continent,” and Britain planned “to work radical changes in the commercial relations and political institutions of at least three of the South American republics” (quoted in LaFeber 1963, 253).
In the face of this direct threat to US commercial interests, President Grover Cleveland, a leader known for his moderate foreign policies, had no choice but to take decisive action.24 His secretary of state, Richard Olney, sent London a strongly worded message in July 1895, restating that the Western Hemisphere was in the United States’ sphere and London had no right to encroach on US interests. Salisbury, the new British prime minister, was caught up in the affairs of South Africa (see below), but when he responded in early December, he bluntly rejected the universality of the Monroe Doctrine. By doing so, he indicated that Britain would continue to press its claims to the Orinoco. This led Cleveland to make his famous message to Congress on December 17 that the United States would resist by every means, “as a willful aggression against its rights and interests,” the appropriation by Great Britain of any territory that rightfully belonged to Venezuela (quoted in LaFeber 1963, 268). Cleveland had taken his nation to the brink. Fortunately, a combination of British concern for South Africa and financial upheaval in the United States allowed cooler heads to prevail, and the crisis was resolved without war (see Kirshner 2007; McDonald 2009).
Scholars who have studied this crisis will accept the above synopsis without controversy. As Patrick McDonald (2009, 162–66) notes, the focus of their academic dispute lies only with the question of why the two sides were able to so quickly end the crisis without conflict (the role played by shared democracy, the capitalist natures of their economies, British concerns for South Africa, etc.). The scholarly agreement on the lead-up to the December crisis simplifies our task here. British encroachment in the Orinoco delta directly challenged US export and resource interests in both Venezuela and the larger South American region. The harsh US reaction was the direct result of declining US trade expectations. Because Venezuela had been aligned with Washington and indeed had been seeking stronger US support for some time, the United States had no reason to seek a war with Britain prior to 1894. Thus while economic realism helps us understand the US interest in open access to South America, it cannot explain why Washington did not push for the formal control of Venezuela or why it reacted only in 1895. Liberals cannot explain why, given the high trade and financial flows between the United States and Britain, the two countries would come so close to war. Mutual dependence does perhaps capture why both sides in the end wished to avoid war (although British concerns about South Africa were a critical constraining factor) (see ibid., 155–82; Kirshner 2007).25 Still, such dependence should have kept the peace from the outset, and it did not.26
Britain’s behavior leading up to the crisis is better grasped by economic realism. Britain, as the world’s financial center, was highly dependent on the flow of foreign currency and gold into London’s financial district. The push into disputed territory in 1894–95 primarily reflected the desire to increase British control over global gold resources. Unlike in the South African case discussed below, there was no immediate and large-scale threat to Britain’s commercial position in South America. The fact that Venezuela had handed out a large contract in the river delta to US companies and was trying to align itself more closely with Washington did suggest that Britain had to move fast to get in on the goodies (LaFeber 1963, 253). But economic realism would be correct to stress that this was Britain acting more on an opportunity for greater commercial control rather than reacting to a significant new threat.
The Fashoda Crisis of 1898–99 can be covered even more briefly, since the events leading up to it are not contested by international relations theorists. The French government clearly initiated the crisis by sending a band of soldiers under Jean Baptiste Marchand to the village of Fashoda in the Upper Nile Valley to dispute Britain’s control of the Nile River. Fashoda was located exactly at the point where four major river systems out of French Congo, British Uganda, and Ethiopia came together to become the White Nile. It was also in the middle of territory London saw as part of the British lands needed to complete the “Cape to Cairo” colonial strip that once joined by a railway line, would ensure British economic dominance of the western half of Africa. Since France already controlled most of western Africa, French leaders knew that a move to Fashoda would be highly provocative. They did not expect to force the British to give up the southern part of Sudan to France. Instead, they wanted to use the Fashoda occupation to pressure London to reduce its economic and political hold on Egypt as well as agree to a boundary between British Sudan and French Congo that would ensure French trade access to the headwaters of the Nile, and hence the Nile itself.27
The British government could not take such a challenge lying down. Salisbury had gained a reputation in Paris for moderation, but the French move threatened the whole British colonial position in Africa. If the French were allowed to control Fashoda and the surrounding territory, they would wreck the Cape-to-Cairo plan in one fell swoop. More immediately, the occupation would give France the opportunity to divert or dam up the key rivers feeding the White Nile. In parliamentary debates in 1895, it had become apparent that Egypt depended on the White Nile to supply summer water—water that was critical, among other things, to a cotton crop worth some ten million pounds sterling. The risk of France holding Egypt hostage over water was a real one. As Sir Edward Grey told the House of Commons in February 1899, building on remarks he had made in October, “The possibility of danger to the interests of Egypt in the Nile Valley, rendered possible by [innovations in] engineering science, is such as has never existed before, and the conditions are entirely altered” (quoted in Langer 1960, 559).
The new threat to Britain’s African trade explains why Salisbury’s government was willing to offer no concessions and instead mobilized the British navy for war. Given Britain’s overwhelming naval superiority and the marked instability of the French polity in late 1898, it was not surprising that the French, after reducing their demands to the bare minimum (French commercial access to the Nile), decided to withdraw from Fashoda completely without securing any compensation.28 Trade expectations theory therefore does a good job explaining Britain’s hard-line stance. Like the United States in 1895, Britain had not sought a war, but was more than willing to fight one when its current and future commercial interests were at risk. Economic realism is stronger for the French decision to go to Fashoda. The French government saw an opportunity to improve its access to commerce in eastern Africa and the Nile Valley, and reduce British control of this trade at the same time. No doubt London’s decision to send Herbert Kitchener up the Nile to enforce Britain’s claim to the Sudan reinforced the French belief that something must be done. The Fashoda scheme, however, had been kicked around for some three years by the time it was implemented; it was less a reaction to a threat than a plan to create a threat in order to make commercial gains at Britain’s expense.
In sum, the Fashoda Crisis parallels closely the general format of the Venezuelan Crisis, with one power (Britain in 1894–95, and France in 1898) seeking an opportunity for gain and another power (the United States in 1895, and Britain in 1898) reacting fiercely to an emerging threat. The main difference, of course, is that Britain did not believe it was bringing on a crisis over Venezuela, meaning that it was up to Cleveland to bring the two sides toward the brink. France in 1898 was looking for a dangerous crisis precisely to compel Britain to make concessions. Trade expectations theory covers the behavior of the initiator of the first crisis and the defending state in the second, while economic realism does the opposite. Liberalism once again is disconfirmed: Britain and France were strong trade partners in 1898, and as such, should not have fallen into such a militarized dispute, let alone have moved so close to war. While liberal scholars may still claim that mutual dependence and shared democratic norms helped both sides pull back from the brink, the fact that the crisis occurred at all remains a mystery.29
THE ANGLO-GERMAN COMMERCIAL RIVALRY AND ORIGINS OF THE BOER WAR
The South African or Boer War is both an easy and difficult case. It is easy because almost all historians agree who started it and for what strategic objective. British officials brought on the war in fall 1899 in order to sustain British supremacy in southern Africa. Individuals such as Colonial Secretary Chamberlain and Prime Minister Salisbury as well as most of the cabinet saw war as the only way to prevent the gold-rich, growing Boer republic of Transvaal from overwhelming British possessions in South Africa in the future. Britain had to act, and act soon. Yet the case is difficult because the documents do not say explicitly why continued predominance was so important to these individuals—enough so as to justify a war that they knew would be costly and hurt relations with other powers, especially Germany. The leaders and officials who led Britain into war operated from the shared assumption that the territories of South Africa could not be allowed to go the way of the US colonies of 1775–83—that is, to become a Dutch-led independent republic united around the gold-rich state of Transvaal and aligned with Britain’s primary adversary (in this case, Germany, rather than France as in the American Revolution). Due to the shared baseline, though, these leaders and officials rarely talked about the ultimate ends that made the loss of South Africa seem so critical to the empire.
Given this methodological roadblock, I will proceed as the best historians of the war do, and use inference and logic to both support my argument and show that the alternative explanations are inadequate. The focus of any account of the war must be on the thinking of Chamberlain, who supported the first effort to overthrow the Boer republic in December 1895—the failed Jameson Raid—and carefully managed events throughout the 1895–99 period to bring on war under the most optimal conditions. It was Chamberlain who in 1899 convinced a cautious British cabinet that war was necessary should Transvaal refuse to adopt reforms ensuring future British dominance of the Boer republic. It was Chamberlain who because of Salisbury’s variable health and dual responsibilities as both prime minister and foreign minister, was given full control over British dealings with the non-European world. In what follows, then, I examine Britain’s situation in the 1890s mainly through Chamberlain’s eyes. I argue that the nation’s declining global economic position made British leaders sensitive to anything that might make its already-bad situation worse, leading Chamberlain in particular to champion the revitalization of a strong colonial realm. The British colonies in southern Africa were critical to this plan. Given this, all threats to these colonies had to be resisted, especially when they implied direct economic gains for the German state and concomitant commercial losses for the empire.
As Aaron Friedberg (1988) shows, by the 1890s Britons of all stripes woke up to the profound relative economic decline that the country had been experiencing for some two decades. By almost all indexes, Britain after the 1870s was losing ground to the rising industrial powers of Germany and the United States. More than any other official, Chamberlain understood this decline and sought to do something about it. His desired solution was straightforward: use imperial preference tariffs to build tighter ties with Britain’s vast imperial realm of colonies and self-governing dominions. This could protect Britain’s manufacturing as well as export base from German and US competition as it supplied the island with cheap raw materials and food.
Southern Africa played a critical role in Chamberlain’s overall plan in two main ways. First, the area’s growing wealth, both in the British colonies and two independent Boer republics (Transvaal and Orange Free State), meant booming markets and cheap raw materials at a time when Germany had undermined Britain’s traditional economic dominance in Europe. Second, the Transvaal’s vast new discoveries of gold after 1886 had made South Africa increasingly important to the one realm Britain still dominated: global finance. London and its financial district (“the City”) were the center of lending, insurance, and currency transfers for the international system. Control of South African gold would ensure confidence in the pound, backed as it was by British gold reserves (see Stephens 2003; Cain and Hopkins 2002).
The looming threat that obsessed British decision makers after 1893 was this: Should Transvaal absorb the British colonies and create a Boer-dominated United States of South Africa, the flow of exports, investments, and gold would be put at risk. In an open trade system, such a loss would mean little, since British firms dominated both the colonies’ economy (the Cape Colony and Natal) and gold production in the Transvaal. Since the late 1880s, however, Transvaal had been trying to align with Germany to offset Britain’s commanding role in the region. If Transvaal succeeded in uniting the region, the newly formed state would undoubtedly lean even more heavily on Germany. Moreover, the Transvaal regularly practiced economic discrimination against British products coming through the Cape Colony. Any new and independent Republic of South Africa controlled by Transvaal would likely do the same, but on a much larger scale. The impact on British economic power, already in decline relative to Germany, would be significant. Lower exports would mean reduced profits for British firms along with less gold and foreign currency flowing back to the home island. This would exacerbate Britain’s historically large trade deficit while undermining confidence in the country’s financial sector, all at a time when dominance in global banking and insurance was the only thing keeping the British pound strong (Friedberg 1988; Kennedy 1980, 1987). And the European power that would slip in to fill the gap would, of course, be Germany.
The figures on British decline after 1870 in areas other than finance are quite startling. Of the five-power European system of Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Austria, Britain produced an amazing 61 percent of the system’s total iron and steel in 1870, with Germany at 13 percent and Russia at only 4 percent of the total. But by 1900 Germany had overtaken Britain, producing 40 percent of system total and Britain only 30 percent (with Russia at 13 percent).30 Britain’s position in manufacturing was also slipping dramatically. Its share of world manufacturing in 1870 was 32 percent and Germany’s was 13 percent; thirty years later it was 20 percent to Germany’s 17 percent, and by 1906–10, Germany would overtake Britain with a 16 percent share compared to Britain’s 15 percent (Friedberg 1988, 26).31 Britain’s falling competitiveness took its toll on its trade balance. Through the latter half of the nineteenth century, Britain ran trade deficits that were offset by payments for its banking, shipping, and insurance services. When Britain’s manufacturing was at its height, however, these deficits were relatively small. In 1872, the year when British exports peaked relative to imports, the trade deficit was approximately 11 percent of the total import bill. Over the next quarter century, as imports rose and exports leveled off or fell, the deficit ballooned, such that by 1898, it represented a staggering 38 percent of imports (Fieldhouse 1973, table 1).32
British politicians were keenly aware of these stark drops in Britain’s competitive position, as the work of Friedberg (1988), Hoffman (1983), and Kennedy (1980, 1987) reveals. Especially worrisome was Germany’s growing industrial might and competitiveness after 1890. The figures compiled by Hoffman show the trends. In 1892, German and British exports into Belgium/Holland and Russia were about equal, but by 1899 German exports were approximately 10 percent and 60 percent higher than Britain’s, respectively. For Denmark, Norway, and Sweden as a group, Germany’s export advantage over Britain doubled from 25 percent in 1892 to approximately 50 percent by 1899. Britain maintained its dominant position in Italy and on the Iberian Peninsula, but here too Germany was closing the gap. Of the countries Hoffman studies, it was only with France—a country that had significantly increased tariffs in 1892, partly out of fear of German growth—that Britain was able to hold its relative lead.33
Chamberlain needed no convincing that Britain was in decline. Since the late 1880s, he had been arguing that only an imperial preference system would save Britain from rising German and US productivity. By raising tariffs against states outside the empire, Britain would increase its manufacturing exports, allowing it to buy even more primary products from the colonies and dominions. Such a claim made some sense. Exports of manufactured goods to nonempire countries had fallen 57 percent between the years 1870 and 1900, but exports of such products to the empire had increased 65 percent and indeed overtaken the nonempire exports in absolute terms (Cain and Hopkins 2002, 156). The growth markets, in short, were within the empire itself. The white-dominated dominions, which included the two South African states of Cape Colony and Natal, made up about half (49 percent) of all British exports to the empire by 1896–1900, up from 44.7 percent in the 1871–75 period (derived from ibid., table 5.3). The Cape Colony alone was already purchasing 13.6 million pounds worth of British goods by 1896, twice that of Canada and nearly one-half of India, a colony with many times the Cape’s population (Hoffman 1983, 199).
The ongoing fear of British officials through the 1890s was that Germany would exploit its growing economic ties to Transvaal to pull this gold-rich republic out of the British sphere. Massive reserves of gold had been discovered in 1886 near the future town of Johannesburg, and German firms and miners quickly move in. The growth in Transvaal’s wealth was nothing short of astonishing: by the end of the 1890s, its national income would increase twenty-five times the 1885 level. It was soon obvious to all that Transvaal would shortly become the center of the southern African universe. Railways were a key part of the emerging threat. In 1887, the Transvaal government gave a charter to the Netherlands South African Railway Company—a company that was nominally Dutch but financed by German money—to build a railway from the Portuguese port of Lorenzo Marques at Delagoa Bay (in modern-day Mozambique) to Pretoria and Johannesburg. Delagoa Bay was one of the few good harbors along the whole East African coast (Cape Town, the main port of the Cape Colony, was on the western tip of the continent). From the British perspective, a German-controlled railway line to Delagoa was a direct threat to the Cape Colony’s plan to build its own railway into Transvaal to support British gold interests (Langer 1960, 218).
Chamberlain quickly saw the problem: Dutch Afrikaners in the Cape Colony, making up two-thirds of the white population in the self-governing colony, would cozy up to their Transvaal brethren and together align with Germany against Britain. In a speech in 1888, he stated that “sooner or later [the Dutch in the Cape Colony], with the sympathy of the Dutch in the Transvaal and of the Orange Free State, would stretch out their hands to the kindred nation (Germany), which is already established on the west coast of Africa” (quoted in ibid., 219). Such concern crossed party lines. It had been Liberal prime minister Gladstone in 1885 who had annexed the southern coastal region between Natal and the Cape Colony to forestall any similar German moves (Smith 1996, 37). When rumors arose in 1888 that Germany wanted Delagoa Bay, future Liberal foreign minister Lord Rosebery told the House of Commons that this was a “grave and pregnant matter.” Germany’s control of Delagoa would not only hurt Britain’s South African dominions “but [also] may have an important bearing on our commerce as a country, and be the means of leading to the imposition of differential and hostile [tariff] rates” against British goods (quoted in Hoffman 1983, 203).
The German threat in southern Africa only grew through the 1890s. Paul Kruger, president of the Transvaal Republic, showed a preference for German companies as a way of offsetting the massive British investment in the gold mines near Johannesburg. German firms and German capital, including the national bank along with the lucrative dynamite and whiskey monopolies, dominated almost all the main government-controlled monopolies. As a result of this economic penetration, Germany’s exports to the republic increased fivefold over the years 1889–94 (Langer 1960, 219).
The year 1895 became a time of decision. Salisbury’s Conservatives had come back into office in June, with Chamberlain assuming the position of colonial secretary. Cecil Rhodes, prime minister of the Cape Colony, told Chamberlain of a plan to launch a raid on Transvaal that might stir British uitlanders (foreign residents) in Johannesburg to revolt against the government. What convinced Chamberlain to support it was the deteriorating trade situation between the Cape and Transvaal over 1895. The Cape’s exports to Transvaal had increased 50 percent from 1892 to 1894 as a result of the booming gold business and recently completed Cape Town to Pretoria railway. But in early 1895, with the impending completion of the Netherlands South African Railway to Delagoa Bay, Kruger launched a boldly discriminatory economic policy to shift trade to the new route: he tripled the rate per mile charged to the Cape railway as it crossed the Vaal River into Transvaal. As the ensuing “Drifts Crisis” intensified, Kruger denied Cape goods passage across the Vaal. Salisbury and Chamberlain sent Kruger an ultimatum in November backed by the implied threat of military action. Kruger retreated and allowed goods to cross into Transvaal, but he did not revoke the exorbitant new railway charges. With the openings of the Delagoa Bay railway, the Cape Colony continued to see its exports to Transvaal plummet (Smith 1996, 62–66).
Back in London, Chamberlain was ready to go further. On December 26, he informed Salisbury that the raid from Botswana into Transvaal was imminent, and if the uitlanders rose up as expected and overthrew the Boer republic, “it ought to turn to our advantage” (quoted in ibid., 92–93). The Jameson Raid failed miserably, however, with all its members captured by early January. Notwithstanding the obvious diplomatic risks inherent in Rhodes’s scheme, it was anxieties about growing German influence in Transvaal that convinced Chamberlain and Salisbury to support it. As Langer (1960, 228–29) observes, even after the Vaal River crossing was reopened, in British government circles there was a “growing feeling that the Germans were squarely behind Kruger.” The British had been upset by the presence of German warships at the formal opening of the Netherlands South African Railway to Delagoa Bay in June. There were reports that many of the capitalists in Transvaal opposing Rhodes were actually agents of Germany. In November, Langer notes, an English agent in Pretoria informed the Cape government that the Germans were buying up as much land as they could around Delagoa Bay to strengthen their claims to the area. This news aligned with Chamberlain’s warning to Salisbury two months before that Germany might try to take advantage of Portugal’s financial difficulties to grab the bay. The possession of the railway to Delagoa by a “foreign power,” meaning Germany, “would be disastrous and ought to be prevented if possible,” Chamberlain argued (quoted in Robinson and Gallagher 1961, 428).
Perhaps most indicative of the state of British feelings by 1895 are comments made by Edward Malet, ambassador to Berlin, to German foreign minister Adolf Marschall in late October. Malet told Marschall that the Transvaal was the “black point” in Anglo-German relations due to Germany’s continued support for the republic, and Berlin’s behavior might eventually become intolerable and lead to “serious complications” (some German records indicate that Malet even used the word war).34 Marschall replied that Germany only sought to support the status quo. But it would not let Transvaal collapse under Rhodes’s schemes or permit the railway to Delagoa Bay to fall into his hands (Langer 1960, 228). This blunt discussion mirrored one from earlier in the year, when Malet told Marschall that the British were unhappy that Germany was “coquetting” with Transvaal leaders, making them believe that “whatever they did would have behind it the support of Germany.” Marschall responded that Berlin’s policy was simply aimed at defending the material interests Germany had developed with the Transvaal through the building of railways and trade connections. He charged Rhodes with wanting to absorb the Transvaal into a British-dominated South African state. Malet denied this, arguing that Rhodes merely wanted to create a commercial federation for all of South Africa. Marschall replied that this also would be contrary to German interests, since it meant “politically a [British] protectorate, and economically … the exclusion of German trade.”35
When the Jameson Raid was reported in Berlin in late December 1895, the German government immediately authorized the landing of German troops from a cruiser in Delagoa Bay. Marschall warned London that Transvaal’s independence must be maintained given important German economic interests as well as Berlin’s sensitivity to public opinion. He even contacted Paris to gauge its interest in a joint response.36 By early January, as the failure of the raid became clear, Salisbury and Chamberlain distanced themselves from it by blaming Rhodes and forcing his resignation. With the publication of the “Kruger telegram,” however, the downward slide in Anglo-German relations continued. In a one-sentence note sent on January 3, 1896, Kaiser Wilhelm expressed his “sincere congratulations” that President Kruger, supported by his people and “without appealing for the help of Friendly Powers,” had emerged victorious against the armed bands that had invaded his country (GDD, 2:387). The British government and people exploded in anger. The German government was seen not only as intervening in British colonial matters but also as implying that had Jameson not been defeated, Germany might have been a “friendly power” that would have come to Transvaal’s aid.
The Kruger telegram was a turning point in Anglo-German relations. Coming more than a year before Berlin officially embarked on Weltpolitik, it undermined the modicum of trust that the two countries had shared. London saw it as an effort to undermine the empire on which British strength was founded. Berlin for its part could not understand why the British would make such a fuss over a one-sentence telegram, suspecting that London was covertly setting out to contain and constrain German economic growth. The trade-security spiral that had been building in 1894–95 would now gain a momentum that would take the countries into war by 1914 (chapter 3). Salisbury’s government was alarmed enough by the telegram to send three naval ships to Delagoa Bay in mid-January 1896, notwithstanding Germany’s naval presence there. In March, the House of Commons authorized a naval program that included five new battleships and thirteen cruisers—a program ostensibly directed at the growing navies of France and Russia, but reinforced by deteriorating relations with Germany (ibid., 2:396).
For their part, the kaiser and his officials, now doubly wary of Britain’s intentions, came out of the South African Crisis fully convinced that without a strong navy, Germany could not protect its growing global commerce against British high-handedness. On the day of the Kruger telegram, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, who was not yet Germany’s naval secretary but had been asked for his opinion on naval construction, sent a memorandum to the kaiser calling for two squadrons of eight battleships each. In an early statement of his risk-fleet logic, Tirpitz argued that such a buildup would at least force Britain to be “more conciliatory” toward Germany. When the memorandum reached Wilhelm three days later, the kaiser, frustrated by Germany’s inability to project power during the Transvaal Crisis, was still focused on building cruisers to handle such regional tasks, and Tirpitz’s suggestions were not taken up (Massie 1991, 169; Kelly 2011, 107–17). But when Tirpitz became state secretary of the navy in June 1897, he soon convinced Wilhelm and his colleagues that a balance of both battleships and cruisers was needed to give Germany a true naval presence opposite Britain. The Anglo-German naval race was on, with the dispute over South Africa providing one of the key triggers.37
Chamberlain recovered from the Jameson debacle with only minimal damage to his position. The raid itself only reinforced in his mind the significance of maintaining the dominance of Britain’s position in southern Africa. Between 1896 and 1897, it became clear to him that there were only two ways the problem could be fixed: either the Boers in Transvaal would have to voluntarily relinquish control to the uitlanders through an expanded franchise or Britain would have to initiate war to force Transvaal into a larger British union of South African states. Chamberlain, unlike his future high commissioner to South Africa, Alfred Milner, was well aware of the likely costs and risks of an all-out war with Transvaal. As he told the House of Commons in May 1896, a war in South Africa “would be one of the most serious wars that could possibly be waged.” It would “[have] the nature of a Civil War,” a “long [and] costly war” that would leave resentment for generations, even if Britain won. Nonetheless, the first goal of British policy was to “preserve our position as the paramount State” and ensure that British authority “should be predominant in South Africa” (quoted in Smith 1996, 119–20). The tension between Chamberlain’s larger objective and his recognition of the costs of war would haunt him for the next three years: he would seek to coerce the Boers to accept a peaceful transition to uitlander dominance even as he kept war in his pocket as the ultimate solution to the problem of decline.
The defining document of Britain’s dilemma—one that would guide decision making for the next three years—was written in late March 1896 by Lord Selborne, Chamberlain’s undersecretary at the colonial office and Salisbury’s son-in-law. This long memorandum to Chamberlain on South Africa laid out the problems and possible solutions in stark detail. The overriding issue animating the whole report was whether British possessions in South Africa would remain under London’s control—as separate states or part of a Canadian-style confederation that would include the two Boer states—or be absorbed within a Dutch-dominated South African republic led by Transvaal. Selborne was pessimistic about London’s ability to prevent a repeat of the American Revolution, this time with Transvaal leading the charge. Transvaal was now the “richest spot on earth” and thus was exerting a gravitational force on all its neighbors. “Transvaal will be the market for South Africa: the market for the manufactures of Cape Colony and Natal; the market for the agricultural products of those Colonies and of Rhodesia,” proclaimed Selborne. “The commercial interest [in] the closest connection with the Transvaal will outweigh all other considerations.” The British colonies would ultimately have to sue for closer commercial union, and Transvaal could demand as the price of admission that these states join a “United Republic of South Africa.”38
Yet Transvaal had an ironic problem, Selborne observed. It was attracting so many English uitlanders that on its own, it could not permanently remain a Dutch republic—the uitlanders would eventually assume control by sheer numbers. Hence Pretoria had to draw the Cape Colony and Natal, with their large Dutch majorities, into a larger United States of South Africa. It could not do otherwise if it wanted to maintain internal Afrikaner dominance. This meant that even if London wanted to wait it out, uitlander population growth meant that the Dutch Boers could not—they needed a Transvaal-dominated Republic of South Africa just to survive internally. There was no jumping through the horns of this dilemma: Transvaal’s declining domestic situation would force it to act in a way that would only exacerbate Britain’s larger problem of decline. The report’s pessimism did not end there, though. One and only one great power would benefit from all these developments—namely, Germany. The day after a united South African republic was declared, Selborne noted, Germany would swoop in and occupy Walfisch Bay, the strategic British port in the middle of German Southwest Africa. Then it would pressure the new republic to grant Germany favors to realize its larger ambition: “to connect her possessions on the West Coast of Africa with those on the East Coast.”
To deal with the situation, Selborne suggested the immediate securing of Delagoa Bay and formation of a large Canada-like dominion for South Africa. If Britain took the bay from Portugal, this would allow the Cape Colony to achieve commercial and financial dominance over Transvaal. By convincing Transvaal that it was hemmed in, its leaders would be forced to “renounce their foreign intrigues” and come to terms with Britain. If, conversely, control of the railway passed to “a Foreign Power working with the Transvaal against British interests,” then the results would be “very serious.” The next sentence leaves little doubt as to which foreign power Selborne is referring. The Transvaal and this foreign power
could then secure a monopoly of all Transvaal trade for the Delagoa Bay Railway with the effect not only of supplanting British imports by (say) German imports, and not only of inflicting grievous commercial injury on the trading classes of the Cape Colony and Natal, but they could also reduce [those classes] to the verge of financial bankruptcy, so dependent are they upon their railway revenue.
The loss of the railway would put added pressure on the British possessions to join a larger Transvaal-led union. It was therefore “a matter of vital importance” to prevent the railway from passing into the control “of any power whatever except the Portuguese or British Governments.” Selborne ends the memo by stating that if Portugal could not hold on to Delagoa Bay, Britain should act to secure it.
British actions over the next three years closely followed Selborne’s strategic logic, and the story can be told in short order. Through the remainder of 1896, Salisbury sought to convince Lisbon to transfer Delagoa Bay to Britain, but Portugal would not budge. In December, he considered sending part of the fleet to Delagoa Bay to impress Pretoria and Berlin with British concern for the port. The fleet was dispatched in March 1897 as a new crisis arose over Pretoria’s restrictions on uitlanders (Robinson and Gallagher 1961, 440–43; Smith 1996, 136–39). In April, Chamberlain reminded a group gathered at a banquet for Milner, the Cape Colony and Natal’s new high commissioner, that Britain was determined to maintain its position as “the paramount power in South Africa.” But before Milner left, Chamberlain told him to remember that a war with the Transvaal would be unpopular at home unless started on “the utmost and clearest provocation.” In the short term, then, Britain had to play a “waiting game” (quoted in Smith 1996, 150–51).
Both Chamberlain and Milner believed that the situation would probably be solved without war, since the Boer leadership would ultimately capitulate to London’s demands for greater uitlander representation. Chamberlain nevertheless spent much of 1897 and 1898 establishing Britain’s right to intervene militarily in the Transvaal should Kruger prove intransigent on the issue. In October 1897, Chamberlain prepared a note for Pretoria asserting Britain’s claim to “suzerainty” over Transvaal—a word explicitly used in the British-Transvaal 1881 convention, yet left out of the 1884 convention at Pretoria’s insistence. Selborne knew this note would outrage Kruger, but “it will be of great value as asserting our position before all the world.” It was sent in December, although Kruger did not respond until April 1898, rejecting the suzerainty claim outright. He correctly saw it as a tool to justify interference in Transvaal’s internal affairs and prevent it from appealing for aid from interested foreign states (most obviously, Germany) (quoted in ibid., 174–76).
After Kruger won reelection by a large margin in February 1898, it seemed much less likely that the uitlanders would gain control of Transvaal through Boer capitulation. On February 23, Milner wrote Chamberlain that the solution to Britain’s troubles was by reform or war, but the chances for reform now were “worse than ever.” Hence, he was “inclined to work up to a crisis” by pressing for a redress of injustices. British needed an “active policy”—supported by a large army—that insisted on British rights (quoted in ibid., 185). Chamberlain reminded Milner that a war would be unpopular and costly, and if it were to come, it was “most important that Transvaal should be the aggressor” (quoted in Langer 1960, 607).
To avoid conflicts on too many fronts at once, Chamberlain approached Germany in early 1898 to try to resolve issues over Africa and China, but the initial meetings proved unproductive.39 London restarted talks in May 1898 with Lisbon over Delagoa Bay. With Portugal in bad financial shape, Salisbury and Chamberlain hoped they could convince Lisbon to transfer the bay and the Portuguese section of the railway to Britain, or at least agree to use Portuguese colonies as collateral for any British loan. This would give London strong leverage should Portugal be unable to repay its loan. When Berlin got wind of the talks in June, it immediately pushed London to include Germany in any loan arrangement and agree secretly to the distribution of Portuguese colonies should Lisbon default. By mid-June, the British seemed willing to at least discuss the issue. But it quickly became apparent to the Germans that the primary British goal, above all else, was to grab Delagoa Bay.40 Despite suspicions regarding British plans, negotiations continued, and on August 30, London and Berlin reached a secret agreement to partition Portugal’s African colonies should Lisbon default on a joint British-German loan. Caving to British demands, Germany gave Britain the southern half of Mozambique, the area that included Delagoa Bay, in return for northern Mozambique, the territory that bordered on German East Africa.41
The Anglo-German agreement seemed to resolve the issue of which great power would control access routes into the Transvaal. Unfortunately, it became a dead letter in late 1898 when Portugal, understandably wary of both Britain and Germany, accepted a less constraining loan offer from France. For some authors, the simple fact that Berlin had agreed to relinquish Delagoa Bay meant that Germany no longer posed a problem for Britain in South Africa (Smith 1996, 39, 208–9). In situations of anarchy, however, leaders know that others can change their minds. And given the intense decade-long concern shown toward Germany’s increasing commercial and political ties to Transvaal, it is hard to believe that any British official would think Germany would avoid exploiting a future united South African republic merely because of a secret dead letter agreement. The very fact that Germany wanted northern Mozambique would have reminded the British that Berlin was still greatly interested in linking its western and eastern colonial possessions into a commercially valuable Mittelafrika. So with the August 30 deal negated by the French loan, all the problematic implications of Transvaal’s continued growth identified in Selborne’s 1896 memorandum, including the worry about Germany’s ties to a future Dutch Republic of South Africa, remained in play.
With the Delagoa Bay question still unresolved by late 1898, events began to move quickly. The Boer leadership was alerted to British plans through a remarkable meeting between Jan Smuts, Transvaal’s attorney general, and British envoy Edmund Fraser on December 22. According to Smuts’s record, written that day, Fraser told him that the British government had done nothing for two years because of the Jameson Raid, but “the time had now … come for her to take action.” Smuts asked what he meant, and Fraser replied that Gladstone had made “a great mistake” in giving Transvaal its full independence back in 1881. Afrikaners throughout South Africa had an “aspiration for a great republic,” and Gladstone had by his action “encouraged this aspiration.” London had in the interim allowed this situation to continue, but had “now come to make an end of this by ‘striking a blow.’” London, Fraser went on, would be happy if Transvaal remained a richer version of the Orange Free State, yet it knew that Pretoria would not accept such a humble role. Transvaal had rejected Britain’s “paramount influence” and “always coquetted with the European powers.” It was therefore time to show the Boers “that England was master in South Africa.”42 Five months later, Smuts wrote that Fraser had also stated that day that “the position and influence of the [Transvaal] … had filled all Dutchmen with the idea that a great Afrikaner republic would be established in South Africa. The longer England waited, the stronger would this separatist aspiration become and the weaker [England’s] own position; and it was now a question whether she would sit still any longer.”43
These strikingly blunt admissions not only reveal British perceptions of the core problem—namely, that Transvaal would use its growing strength to organize a larger Dutch republic. They also show that London was indeed concerned about Transvaal’s ongoing policy of coquetting with foreign powers. The fact that this phraseology—the same one used by Ambassador Malet in discussions with German officials in 1895—comes four months after the August 1898 agreement (and just after its subsequent negation) indicates that British officials were still very much worried about Transvaal’s ongoing ties to Germany.
Following this meeting, Pretoria understandably sought to avoid war by preventing the uitlander issue from being used as a pretext. In March 1899, Kruger offered the foreign mining interests in Johannesburg a “Great Deal”: if they would allow certain monopolies to continue, he would grant them concessions in other areas, including the ability to appoint advisers to oversee the state’s financial administration. He also announced that he would reduce the residency time required for an uitlander to achieve full citizenship from fourteen years to nine (Meredith 2007, 394–95). But the uitlanders balked, and the Great Deal fell through. In late May, High Commissioner Milner met Kruger to discuss the possibility of a deal. Kruger offered Milner a “reform bill” reducing the residency requirement to a maximum of seven years, with gold-mining districts receiving five new seats in the Transvaal Parliament. Milner insisted on a maximum of five years of residency and seven new seats. When Kruger showed reluctance to go further, arguing that he could not hand his country over to strangers, Milner abruptly ended the talks and returned to Cape Town (ibid., 405–8; Smith 1996, 278–87). The British were at a point where they felt only significant concessions could avert war. A week before the summit, Milner had told London that if Kruger failed to accept British demands, “it would better to fight now than in 5 or 10 years hence,” when the Transvaal “will be stronger and more hostile than ever” (quoted in Smith 1996, 289).
In mid-July, Kruger announced that six new seats had been added to Parliament for the gold-mining districts. Such concessions, Selborne told Chamberlain, were just efforts to buy time and prevent the consolidation of British public opinion (Meredith 2007, 410). Chamberlain decided to up the ante. In a speech to the House of Commons on July 28, he argued that British-Boer “race antagonism” was spreading from Transvaal into neighboring states, creating “a constant menace to the [region’s] peace and prosperity.” After detailing uitlander grievances, he asked Parliament to back the government and help Kruger see the necessity of yielding.44 Chamberlain was seeking to mobilize public opinion behind one last effort at coercion—and if that should fail, for war.
Seeing where things were going, Kruger proposed one last set of concessions. In mid-August, he offered to meet Britain’s demand for a maximum five-year waiting period for citizenship and give the mining areas ten seats in the Parliament, or a full one-quarter of the total. In return, Britain would have to end its claim to suzerainty over Transvaal and agree not to interfere in its internal matters. On August 26, Chamberlain spoke publicly of Kruger’s delaying tactics, and argued that Britain was now free to establish the conditions for determining once and for all which state was the paramount power in South Africa. Two days later, he sent a note to Pretoria accepting Kruger’s concessions while rejecting his two additional conditions (Smith 1996, 358; Meredith 2007, 414).
Chamberlain had clearly decided that the crisis would now end either in a last-minute capitulation or war. He spend most of September bringing the cabinet on board for the final push. On September 6, he provided the cabinet with a memorandum reiterating that Britain’s position in South Africa and the world was now at stake. The threat came from the Dutch, who were trying “to get rid altogether of the connection to Great Britain” and “substitute a United States of South Africa” (quoted in Robinson and Gallagher 1961, 454–55). When the cabinet met two days later, Chamberlain’s call for the buildup of ten thousand British soldiers in the area was accepted. His report to Milner later that day indicated that the cabinet was united on every key point. Prime Minister Salisbury himself was firmly on board for the final gambit. Chamberlain wrote Queen Victoria on September 23 that given Transvaal’s rejection of British demands, it was “impossible to avoid believing that the Boers really aim at setting up a South African Republic, consisting of the Transvaal, the Orange Free State and Your Majesty’s [colonies].” In early October, in a letter to Lord Courtney, he indicated that the conduct of not just Pretoria but also the Afrikaner leaders in the Cape Colony had led him to the belief “that there is an understanding among [Dutch] leaders … and their aspiration is the restoration of South Africa to the Dutch race” (quoted in Langer 1960, 616–17).
The Boers of Transvaal obliged the British by rejecting London’s final ultimatum and, with their Orange Free allies, launching a preemptive attack on Natal in late October 1899. Chamberlain had his war to maintain British “paramountcy” in South Africa. Yet as we have seen, from the perspective of Chamberlain and his associates, British supremacy in South Africa was intimately tied to the overall economic and political power of the British Empire. At a time when British trading strength was on the wane, the nation could not allow the Transvaal to stay independent and ultimately absorb the rest of South Africa into a powerful Dutch-led republic. Even without considering the possible domino effect on other possessions, including India, the British had to worry that this new republic would align with Germany, destroying British trade, investments, and gold production in the region.
In sum, by 1898–99, it was evident that the future of the British Empire’s global economic position was at stake, and something had to be done soon before things got worse. Declining commercial expectations were bolstering British fears of overall decline, making preventive action necessary. Alternative explanations prove quite weak. Chamberlain and Salisbury were cautious men who would have been happy if the Boer leadership had simply agreed to allow the uitlanders to control Transvaal’s domestic politics. They were certainly not plunging Britain into what was expected to be a costly, unpopular war to win elections or satisfy capitalist parochial interests back home. Liberal and neo-Marxist arguments that see unit-level forces as propelling are inadequate. As Selborne’s memorandum made apparent to all, the South African situation was fundamentally about Britain’s larger place in a global economic struggle that had Germany as the empire’s main European competitor. And yet this war was not just about Britain’s rising dependence on trade with South Africa, as economic realists would have to contend. Something was causing a fall in British trade expectations, and that something was Transvaal’s continued growth, its recognized need to absorb the British colonies, and its long-standing ties to the German state and German capital—exogenous realities that were not going to be altered by diplomacy alone. In an environment of overall economic decline, the British leadership could not afford to see the South African region slip from its grasp, only to land in the hands of its main economic rival in Europe.
CONCLUSION
This chapter has demonstrated the important role of falling trade expectations in the explanation of the imperialist struggles of the great powers from 1880 to 1900. For cases such as the French, British, and German scrambles for Africa and the Boer War, the trade expectations argument strongly outperforms realist and liberal explanations linking trade to conflict. In these cases, leaders were reluctant to embark on new imperial campaigns, and only did so once they suspected that other great powers were seeking to deny them access to vital raw materials, investments, and markets. The French after 1880 began to feel squeezed out of West Africa and Tunisia by the British and Italians, respectively. They responded by grabbing Tunisia in 1881–82, in an action that increased British mistrust and led Gladstone to occupy Egypt in 1882 during a period of domestic unrest in Egypt. These moves in turn made the previously anti-imperialist Bismarck realize that unless he acted quickly, the closing door would shut Germany out of Africa, just at the moment when the continent’s potential value for industrializing economies was becoming more self-evident. The British maneuvers to bring on war with the Boer republics of Transvaal and Orange Free State also reflected fears that if London did not act, South Africa would fall under the domination of Transvaal, a state with strong economic and political ties to Germany.
Pessimistic trade expectations plus economic dependence also played crucial roles in other great power conflicts between 1890 and 1900. The Venezuelan and Fashoda crises were clearly tied to the larger US, British, and French struggles for control of and access to materials and markets. Economic realism does a good job by itself in explaining British action over Venezuela and French behavior in the Sudan. But falling expectations of future trade must be brought in to understand Washington’s reaction regarding Venezuela and British policies at Fashoda. Interestingly, these cases also show that democracies can sometimes get close to war over economic matters, notwithstanding the normative and institutional constraints on their behavior. My short review of these two crises omits consideration of some of their more purely geopolitical and prestige dimensions. And the cases of Italian and German unification demonstrate that interdependence is sometimes completely overshadowed by noneconomic factors: neither dependence nor trade expectations had any discernible role in Cavour’s decision to unite Italy through war in 1859–60 or Bismarck’s wars to unite Germany from 1864 to 1870. In the latter case, however, systemic variables—particularly the need to build Germany’s long-term potential power base—were likely more important than more purely unit-level variables such as social stability, greed, or ideological drives. In this sense, systemic realism still does a better job than liberalism in explaining the pressures for war, even if trade expectations are not a salient systemic factor in such instances.
Chapters 7 and 8 together build our overall confidence in the trade expectations approach. Going beyond the well-known twentieth-century cases, these chapters highlight that across a wide variety of geopolitical and ideological settings, a broad assortment of great powers were often driven by one common obsession: the maintenance and enhancement of their access to raw materials, investments, and markets in the face of perceived threats. Notwithstanding differences in domestic type, great powers as diverse as Britain, France, Germany, the United States, and Russia were more than willing to initiate coercive diplomacy as well as war when they saw economic access to be under threat. In the next chapter, I extend the trade expectations approach to such contemporary issues as the rise of China and growth of Sino-American economic relations.
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1 Albrecht-Carrié 1973, chap. 4; Ridley 1980, chaps. 33–36; Taylor 1954; Smith 1985.
2 Positive trade expectations were also reinforced by France’s extension of the provisions of the Cobden-Chevalier Treaty to most Western European states (but not Prussia) by 1863. This helped to create a zone of economic cooperation that may have moderated military concerns as well. See Coutain 2009.
3 Because it is so hard to establish the cause of the British-French peace of 1860–70 through documentary sources, I do not consider this as a case period in table 2.7. British-French trade did more than double between 1860 and 1870 (EHS, 598–99), indicating that both the trade expectations and liberal arguments at least have the correlations right.
4 See also Pflanze 1963; Mosse 1958; Steefel 1932; Carr 1991.
5 Pflanze 1963; Albrecht-Carrié 1973; Pottinger 1966; Wawro 1997; Carr 1991.
6 Because the 1864 and 1866 wars were both Bismarckian schemes to expand at Austria’s expense, I consider1860–66 as one case period in table 2.7.
7 Howard 1961; Pflanze 1963; Carr 1991.
8 For documents, see GDD, 1:1–19. For summaries and references, see Langer 1950, chap. 2; Pflanze 1990, chap. 9; Seton-Watson 1972, chap. 1; Trachtenberg 2011.
9 For summaries and references, see Seton-Watson 1972; Pflanze 1990; Steinberg 2011; Albrecht-Carrié 1973; Taylor 1954.
10 For summaries of other neo-Marxist theorists, including Hilferding, Luxenburg, and Kautsky, see Cohen 1973; Mommsen 1977.
11 See Wehler 1985; Snyder 1991; Mommsen 1977, chap. 4; Baumgart 1982, chap. 5.
12 See also Darby 1987; Fieldhouse 1973.
13 As I show elsewhere, concerns about domestic conflict were not only not driving Germany’s hard-line behavior in July 1914, they were actually giving German leaders an incentive to avoid war (Copeland 2000b, chaps. 3–4). And as this book has demonstrated, such concerns were not part of British decision making during the Crimean Crisis or Japanese decision making in 1941, the two other most-likely cases of diversionary war in the literature on great powers. (The diversionary argument may still have value for small states, however; see Chiozza and Goemans 2011.)
14 Figures from Copeland 2000b, appendix (based on Kennedy 1987 and the Correlates of War data set); Price 1981, 183.
15 One cannot argue that Ferry at least believed colonialism would help his domestic case. He did not use the Tunisian occupation for electioneering purposes in 1881, and the fact that he lost the October 1881 elections largely because of the Tunisian venture should have made him cautious when he reassumed the premiership in February 1883. It did nothing of the sort: he proceeded to work actively for further colonies, notwithstanding the public’s reaction, and paid the price in spring 1885. See Power 1944, chaps. 2 and 7.
16 Of precedent-setting concern was a Marseille company’s loss of its property rights in a local Tunisian court. When London supported the judgment, Paris responded angrily, and both countries dispatched warships to Tunisia. See ibid., 44–48.
17 Conceptually, this is the third exogenous factor from chapter 1.
18 The trade expectations logic works especially well for explaining Ferry’s later landgrabs in 1883–85 during his second administration, such as his occupations of Madagascar and northern Vietnam. By that point, Britain had already taken Egypt (September 1882) and the struggle over West African trade had intensified. Given concerns about France’s ability to compete without preferential access, Ferry felt he had to grab first and ask questions later. Domestic factors were constraining, not propelling. In taking Madagascar, for example, as Frederick Schuman (1969, 108) relates, Ferry moved with a minimum of publicity, acting from the realization, “already confirmed by painful experience,” that his imperialistic policies, “if openly avowed, would not command the support of the Deputies.” See also Power 1944, chap. 5.
19 As Robinson and Gallagher (1961, 117) note, this was one of the few occasions when Gladstone relaxed his financial caution to support a foreign adventure—a clear sign of “the supreme importance which a restoration of order in Egypt had now assumed.” See also Pakenham 1991, 134.
20 In yet another instance of the risks of pursuing imperialism in France, Freycinet’s government was soundly defeated in late July when it asked for money to back the limited plan of defending the canal. Such a move was seen as a diversion from the focus on the Rhine. Robinson and Gallagher 1961, 118–19.
21 See Turner 1967, 50–52.
22 The quotation is Turner’s (1967, 54) paraphrase from the original document.
23 Bismarck’s actions from April to August 1884 as well as at the Berlin Conference from November 1884 to February 1885 reinforce this interpretation. He spent May and June trying to keep Britain off the scent as he directed his navy to act preemptively against Togo, the Cameroons, and Angra Pequena (see his interchanges with London in GDD, 1:170–80). At the Berlin Conference, he worked with Britain to give the Congo to Belgium, thereby preventing France with its differential tariffs from dominating an area known to possess huge economic potential. He also used the conference to legitimate his new “protectorates” (Togo, Cameroon, and German Southwest Africa) and establish rules that would facilitate acquisition of what is now Tanzania (see Pakenham 1991; Stoecker 1986).
24 On Cleveland’s full awareness of the economic importance of the Orinoco, see LaFeber 1963, 254. See also Campbell 1976.
25 On the tie between the South African Crisis and Britain’s backing down, see Layne 1994.
26 Domestic-level arguments that liberals and neo-Marxists might make—that parochial groups that might benefit from war pushed Cleveland—are weak. Cleveland was known to be his own person, and had strongly resisted interest group pressure in the past (e.g., in the Hawaii annexation debate in 1894–95). Even those who contend that hawkish business interests played a role show little evidence that Cleveland was swayed by their arguments over the critical period from January to December 1895, and much proof that Cleveland was influenced by a Mahanian view emphasizing the importance of commercial access to long-term national power (see especially McDonald 2009, 166–82).
27 See Langer 1960, 538–39, 554–68; Snyder and Diesing 1977, 67–68, 531–33; Schultz 2001, 178, 183–85.
28 Kenneth Schultz (2001, 175–96) also shows that the support of Britain’s opposition parties helped to convince the Paris government of Salisbury’s willingness to go to war if necessary.
29 For a review of these arguments and an important riposte, see Layne 1994.
30 Copeland 2000b, table A.2, calculated from the Correlates of War data set.
31 The United States was the number one manufacturing power by the early 1880s, and by 1906–10, produced over 35 percent of the world’s manufactured goods (ibid.).
32 These figures actually understate the true fall in British trade competitiveness, since they include reexports of goods produced elsewhere, particularly from the colonies and dominions. If we take reexports out of the export total, the British trade deficit for the years 1895–98 is over one-half of the import bill.
33 All figures are based on Hoffman’s (1983, chap. 4) charts.
34 See Kaiser Wilhelm to Adolf Marschall, October 25, 1895, in GDD, 2:368.
35 Adolf Marschall, memorandum, February 1, 1895, in GDD, 2:366–67.
36 Smith 1996, 109; Adolf Marschall, memorandum, December 31, 1895, in GDD, 2:370–71; see also GDD, 2:378, 383. On the active consideration of a “continental league” against Britain, see GDD, 2:372–77.
37 Tirpitz’s naval buildup and the “world policy” (Weltpolitik) announced in mid-1897 fit together as two halves of a plan to protect German commerce around the world. As Smith (1986) shows, the idea of Weltpolitik originated in the foreign policy bureaucracy as a way to ensure German access to trade at a point when Germany was becoming increasingly dependent on overseas markets, raw materials, and investments for its continued economic growth. To be effective, a strong German navy was essential—a line of thinking that fit perfectly with the Mahanian logic that had swept Europe and earlier driven the US naval buildup of the early 1890s. See also my discussion in chapter 3 as well as Copeland 2011a.
38 All quotations in this and the next two paragraphs are from Robinson and Gallagher’s (1961, 434–37) essentially complete version of the document.
39 Joseph Chamberlain, memorandum, March 29, 1898, in FPVE, 453–54; Massie 1991, 245–46.
40 See Paul von Hatzfeldt, telegram to the German Foreign Office, June 14, 1898, in GDD, 3:28–29.
41 See Smith 1996, 208–9; documents in GDD, 3:36–41.
42 Quoted from Smuts’s memorandum on the day of the meeting, in Smith 1996, 205.
43 Quoted from Smuts’s letter to the head of main Dutch political organization in the Cape Colony, in Smith 1996, 205–6.
44 Quoted in Smith 1996, 321–22; Meredith 2007, 410–11. See also Pakenham 2001, 79–80.