Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [89]
But while imperial troops put down dissent, anxiety stalked the consciences of some of those who thought about what it was all for. As long ago as the year of Victoria’s accession, her Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, had been troubled by the ‘necessity by which a nation that once begins to colonize is led step by step over the whole globe’. But still the possessions piled up, until by the later decades of the century a belief had taken hold that it was, in the words of one great colonial administrator, Britain’s ‘manifest destiny’ to rule an empire. This was not, he explained, for any reason as crude as ‘earth hunger’, but was in the interests of those who were lucky enough to find themselves living under British domination. If Britain was governed by Christian principles, it should be possible to ‘foster some sort of cosmopolitan allegiance grounded on the respect always accorded to superior talents and unselfish conduct and on the gratitude derived from favours conferred and those to come’. The man who held these beliefs, Evelyn Baring, was to play the most significant role in one of Britain’s most idiosyncratic possessions – even though it never formally became a part of the empire.
For strategists, imperial ambitions were offset by real practical anxieties. Keeping the empire safe meant, above all, safeguarding India, the grandest possession. That in turn required complete confidence in the security of the Middle East, and especially the safety of the Suez Canal, which had opened in 1869 and had cut the journey time to India from months to mere weeks. The anxiety which racked the minds of the guardians of empire was that Egypt lay within the Ottoman Empire, which had been in steady decline throughout the nineteenth century. There had been suggestions before that the safest way to protect British interests was to seize control of Egypt, talk which Viscount Palmerston had earlier disdainfully dismissed, telling a fellow aristocrat that Britain really did not want to control the country ‘any more than any rational man with an estate in the north of England and a residence in the south would have wanted to possess the inns on the north road. All he could want would have been that the inns should be well kept, always accessible and furnishing him when he came with mutton chops and post-horses.’ But the condition of the country which controlled access to so much of the vital waterway grew worse and worse, and the Egyptian Khedive – the viceroy appointed by the Turks – was a feeble fellow, who had already sold the British government his country’s shares in the canal. Although the place was under Turkish rule, British business had piled into Egypt: the country was so well suited to the production of cotton that substantial fortunes could be made in a very short time (during the disruption caused by the American Civil War, exports increased ten-fold). The Egyptian state was too weak to take proper advantage of the business, and it was Europeans who developed the banking, irrigation and communication systems. Egypt was a tailor’s dummy of a country.
With hindsight, what happened next might seem inevitable. Nationalist Egyptians nursing a great variety of grievances rose up against the foreign influence, under the leadership of Urabi Pasha, a colonel in the army. At first, the British Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone, supported the idea of ‘Egypt for the Egyptians’, which fitted with his scepticism about many of the claims made for empire, as he had demonstrated in voicing his sympathy for proposals for Home Rule for the Irish. He had no plan to invade Egypt. Yet that