Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [122]
But it was not just British business that missed opportunities. The British government too, despite its belated push for Indianization and murky promises of “responsible government,” fell grossly short. There was a glaring difference in the way the British treated its white and nonwhite colonial subjects. As late as 1922, Winston Churchill, then colonial secretary, disparaged the idea of “granting democratic institutions to backward races which had no capacity for self-government.” In stark contrast, starting in the 1840s—at the same time that they were using sepoys in India as cannon fodder—the British voluntarily began granting its white subjects in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand the same rights and liberties won by the American colonies in the 1770s. According to the famous Durham Report of 1838, Britain's Canadian subjects were entitled to control their own destinies, free from rule by a distant authority. This principle was later applied to Britain's other white dominions. By the 1860s, all of Britain's white colonies had effectively been granted independence, with real power lying with the colonists’ elected representatives. In Niall Ferguson's words:
So there would be no Battle of Lexington in Auckland; no George Washington in Canberra; no declaration of independence in Ottawa. Indeed, it is hard not to feel, when one reads the Durham Report, that its subtext is one of regret. If only the American colonists had been given responsible government when they first asked for it in the 1770s—if only the British had lived up to their own rhetoric of liberty—there might never have been a War of Independence. Indeed, there might never have been a United States.38
We can go further. Had Great Britain in its Victorian heyday been able to overcome its racial and ethnic prejudices, had it been able to extend the same tolerance to its “dark-skinned” colonies that it extended to its white dominions, then the modern histories of not just India and Pakistan but Rhodesia, Kenya, Iraq, Egypt, Burma, and a long list of other imperial holdings might have played out very differently.
BRITAIN'S DECLINE, AND WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN
Like that of every world-dominant power before it, Great Britain's rise to global hegemony was fueled by—and almost certainly would not have occurred but for—a dramatic shift from destructive internal ethnic and religious infighting to policies of striking openness and tolerance, judged against the standards of the time. It is no coincidence that the period of Britain's uncontested global supremacy, usually dated to roughly 1858-1918, was also a time when Jews, Huguenots, and Scots were on the whole prospering and participating at virtually every level of British society, including Parliament and the prime ministership. Not only did the Jews and Scots in particular help Britain fund, conquer, and administer its colonial empire overseas; they contributed pivotally to Britain's industrial, financial, and naval supremacy.
Britain's decline did not stem from or even coincide with rising domestic intolerance. If anything, as the first half of the twentieth century unfolded, Britain at home displayed greater tolerance toward its ethnic and religious minorities, at least if immigration policies and the expansion of suffrage are any indication. While historians differ over whom to blame and what to emphasize, most agree that Britain's decline stemmed from some combination of the crippling costs of World Wars I and II; escalating government spending on the welfare state; a crushing foreign debt burden; the devaluation of the pound; the relative stagnation of British industry; and the increasing costs of maintaining control over far-flung colonies, especially ones