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Historical Notes
Scott Newton
Blair and Gladstone
Tony Blair's Labour Party conference speech this year galvanised the delegates who were especially moved by his suggestions that Britain could play the role of an international troubleshooter, bringing liberal values, civilisation and the benefits of its skills in conflict resolution to troubled parts of the world.
There were however some more critical voices, among them that of the distinguished modern British historian Richard Shannon, who accused Blair (Guardian, 3 October 2001) of resurrecting 'Gladstonian imperialism'. What did he mean and is there anything in the charge?
Gladstone was the hero of late-nineteenth century progressives. He supported the struggle for Italian unification, advocated a non-interventionist foreign policy which eschewed ill-advised and jingoistic adventures, argued against a cynical approach to international affairs (such as condoning atrocities in Bulgaria because the Ottoman perpetrators at least kept the Russians out of the Balkans) and worked for Irish Home Rule. He has been seen as a forerunner of Woodrow Wilson, whose crusade for national self-determination inspired millions at the end of World War One, and as one of the founders of liberalism.
So how can he have been an imperialist? The charge rests to a large extent on Gladstone's policy towards Egypt in 1882. Here the great liberal ended up presiding over a colonial adventure by which Egypt was turned from an autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire into a British 'Protectorate''
The 1882 crisis was rooted in Egypt's financial relationship with Britain and France, whose financial sectors had lent the country significant sums of money. (1) This finance had been welcomed by the Egyptian rulers, the Khedives, over many years since they were committed to modernisation and saw western assistance as the key to this process. With help from London and Paris, Egypt invested in a railway network and in urban development, much of this designed to encourage the large-scale export of cotton to world markets. For a time the strategy seemed to work. The high point came, unsurprisingly, in the American civil war which saw a boom in Egyptian cotton exports. Western bankers were satisfied, railway construction flourished, irrigation projects ensured a 33 per cent increase in the country's cultivable area, and Alexandria was transformed into a significant, cosmopolitan port.
With the conclusion of the American civil war Egypt lost its dominant position as a supplier of cotton but Khedive Ismail persisted with modernisation, placing his hope in sugar refining. This proved a disappointment, possibly because some refineries were awkwardly sited. At the same time western interest charges and commissions on money raised by the Khedive began to escalate. It was estimated that having secured five loans worth £55 million the Egyptian Treasury only received £35 million after deductions. By 1875, having repaid £29 million of this, the government still owed the banks another £46 million: the public finances were running out of cash. (2)
At this point alarm bells rang in London and Paris. In 1875 the Conservative administration of Benjamin Disraeli used the crisis to buy the Khedive's shares in the newly built Suez Canal. In 1876 Egypt was forced to accept a new financial regime, known as 'Dual Control'. This put control of Egypt's finances in the hands of British and the French personnel, although the majority were in fact British since they held in bonds more than half of the funded debt.
So it should not be a surprise that the Egyptian Finance Minister, Sir Rivers Wilson was British, as was the Controller-General of Finance, Sir Auckland Colvin (Colvin also happened to be the Egyptian correspondent of Gladstone's favourite paper, the Pall Mall Gazette). Meanwhile HMG agreed that Lord Cromer, otherwise known as Sir Evelyn Baring, and a member of the great banking dynasty, should represent the interests of the bondholders.
The Dual Control system made strides towards paying off the debt - but at a great political cost. Tax increases and reductions in government spending, which fell heavily on the civil service and the armed forces, stirred up nationalist agitation. Landlords, peasants, and army officers all protested and a national movement began to coalesce around a charismatic Francophone, Colonel Arabi. The Anglo-French financiers retreated in the face of demands that the previously moribund Chamber of Notables be revived and found themselves unable to stop it from wielding increasing power from the middle of 1881 at the latest. Early in 1882 the Chamber claimed the right to have a say in the raising and spending of government revenues - to the horror of many Europeans on the spot.
The aspirations of Arabi's movement should have been acceptable to a politician with Gladstone's record. But he was frightened, along with most of the political and financial elite in London. Lord Rothschild, having presided over a reorganisation of the debt in 1879, began to panic, as did the sixty members of Parliament whose personal fortunes were tied up in Egypt. It did not seem possible that Egyptians were responsible enough to look after their own money and concern grew that if Arabi had his way the debts would be repudiated.
Influenced by Colvin, by Rothschild, by the worried MPs and by his own suspicions of Muslim, Oriental culture, Gladstone, far from regarding Arabi as a fellow liberal, saw him as a military despot in the making. He came to the conclusion that anarchy was on the cards in Egypt. A small fleet of gunboats was dispatched to overawe the population and pick up Europeans who wanted to leave - but the move backfired when it provoked panic and a massacre of fifty Europeans in Alexandria. The British and French governments responded on 11 July with a bombardment of fortifications which the Egyptians were erecting (perhaps not surprisingly) to protect the port. The Cabinet was now certain that Arabi's movement would lead Egypt into darkness and bring ruin to western interests there - not just the lives and money of the Anglo-French community but the Suez Canal, which safeguarded the route to India.
It was at this point that Britain's Liberal government decided on intervention. It hoped for French support, which would, in Gladstone's mind at least have helped to preserve some element of international respectability about the enterprise - but none was forthcoming. So a unilateral British invasion occurred. Arabi's forces were overwhelmed at Tel-el-Kebir, he was exiled to Madagascar, and a British Protectorate (Egypt remained nominally part of the Ottoman Empire) installed. The idea of using the term 'Protectorate' was to suggest that far from being another imperialist adventure it had all been for the good of the Egyptian people. But it was the bondholders who really won and it is hardly accidental that the Consul-General was none other than.....Lord Cromer. The power of this sectional interest, centred on the City of London, was not lost on some Liberals and even a few Tories like Randolph Churchill at the time, and their reading of the episode provided a foundation stone of the radical theory of imperialism developed at the turn of the century by the economist J. A. Hobson.
One of the most striking aspects of the Egyptian affair is the way Gladstone managed to convince himself that what was in fact an act of aggression was a war for civilisation. He said it was:
'.....before God and man......an upright war, a Christian war'.On 24 July he told the House of Commons: that
'When..... a reign of law is substituted for that of military violence, something may be founded there which may give hope........for free institutions.........a noble thirst may arise for the attainment of those blessings of civilised life which .......have been achieved in so many countries in Europe.' (3)This kind of talk would not sound out of place if it came from Tony Blair, whose moralistic rhetoric must cause anxiety about the final destination of what currently (writing in late October) appears to be an open-ended and undiscriminating Anglo-American campaign against 'terror' and apparently anything (including support for anti-globalisation movements?) incompatible with what the leading western powers deem acceptable and moral.
As for Gladstone's venture in liberal imperialism, the British occupation left a sour taste in Anglo-Egyptian relations and this has ever since influenced anti-western nationalist movements in the region. Of course the bondholders were satisfied and the Canal secured. But Arabi had never in fact spoken about reneging on the debt and the Canal was only brought into danger, if it ever really was, by the aggressive tactics of the British and the French in the run-up to the occupation. The long-term legacy of 1882 has not been a happy one.
Perhaps the last word should be left to Frederic Harrison, a dissenter of 1882 who was in no doubt about the real meaning of Gladstone's Egyptian adventure, despite the fog of self-justification which surrounded it. Speaking to an Anti-Aggression League meeting on 26 June, that is before Arabi's final defeat, Harrison asked his audience to:
'Imagine your own feelings if you had to send every year some forty million sterling out of the taxes of the country to pay Turkish, or Arab, or Chinese bond-holders; and then, having paid that regularly, that you had to keep a Turkish pasha and a Chinese mandarin in London to control your expenditure, so that every penny of the Budget had to get the sanction of their excellencies, and if Mr Gladstone or any other Chancellor of the Exchequer wishes to put on or take off a tax, down would come a fleet of iron-clads from the Bosphorus into the Thames, and train their 80-ton guns right in view of the Tower and Somerset House. That is the state of Egypt now.' (4)
Notes
1 See for example Roger Owen, 'Egypt and Europe: from French expedition to British occupation', in Roger Owen and Bob Sutcliffe, Studies in the Theory of Imperialism (London: 1972), pp. 195-209. A more recent account can be found in P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688-2000 (London: 2001).
2 M. E. Chamberlain, The Scramble for Africa (London: 1981), p. 38.
3 Quoted in R. Robinson and J. Gallagher, with A. Denny, Africa and the Victorians: the Official Mind of Imperialism (London: 1981), p. 118. In all fairness to Blair he would not show the suspicion of Islam which marked some of Gladstone's speeches during the 1882 crisis.
4 The speech was published as a pamphlet (The Crisis in Egypt) by the Anti-Aggression League. Excerpts from it can be found in Chamberlain, The Scramble for Africa, pp. 113-114.
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