How British was the British World? The Case of South Africa

Abstract

This paper discusses the utility of the term ‘Britishness’ in the context of the ‘British World’ conference series. It suggests reasons why the ‘British world’ idea as presently understood was relatively slow to emerge out of traditional nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperial and commonwealth history. Ranging over more than a century from the 1870s to the present, it surveys uses of the term ‘British’ in imperial historiography and draws most of its empirical evidence from the unusual case of South Africa. The paper eschews ‘ethnic’ or ‘racial’ definitions of Britishness and proposes instead a more capacious formulation capable of including elective, hyphenated forms of belonging. It suggests that there are advantages in thinking of the British Empire less in the possessive sense – the empire that belonged to Britain – and more in the adjectival mode as a mode of description capable of taking into account self-declared affinities and values.

Acknowledgements

This paper was delivered as a keynote address to the most recent ‘British World’ conference, held in Bristol in 2007. Trevor Burnard, Donal Lowry and Andrew Thompson have made helpful comments and suggestions as well as correcting many errors.

Notes

See e.g. Bridge and Fedorowich, ‘Mapping the British World’, Buckner and Douglas Francis, Rediscovering the British World and Thompson, Imperial Britain.

Cannadine, ‘British History’.

Kennedy, ‘Imperial History and Post-Colonial Theory’; Vaughan, ‘Colonial Discourse Theory and African History’. Vaughan's specific focus is on Africanist historians but her arguments apply more broadly too.

Fieldhouse, ‘Can Humpty-Dumpty Be Put Together Again?’; cf. Thompson, ‘Is Humpty Dumpty Together Again?’

The early modern British world provides an exemplar. See Bailyn's influential call for a ‘rescaling of perspective … in which the basic unit of discussion is larger than any of the traditional units within which research began’. ‘The Challenge of Modern Historiography’, 13.

Marshall, ‘British Imperial History’; Wilson, ‘Old Imperialisms and New Imperial Histories’.

On the links, see, e.g. Armitage, ‘Greater Britain’.

Ibid., 437. See also Lake, ‘E. A. Freeman (1823–1892)’.

The distinction between ‘citizen subjects’ and ‘subject citizens’ has been attributed to the Australian labour leader and future prime minister J. C. Watson, speaking in 1901. It was also used by Alfred Deakin to distinguish between Australians and Indians respectively. See Hancock, ‘The Commonwealth, 1900–1914’.

For example, the work of Jack Greene, Nicholas Canny, Antony Pagden and Bernard Bailyn.

In Robinson and Gallagher's seminal article ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, 1–2, ‘[h]istorians such as Seeley and Egerton [who] looked on events in the formal empire as the only test of imperial activity’ are seen as one side of a view of empire they reject; the opposite view, which they likewise reject, is taken by radical opponents of late-Victorian empire such as Hobson, Lenin and Leonard Woolf. See also Wm. Roger Louis' comment that Robinson and Gallagher ‘expose the central error of earlier historians such as John R. Seeley and Hugh Edward Egerton and untold numbers of historians of the British Empire whose interpretations have been guided by constitutional and racial concepts – the same as those which originally inspired the imperial federation movement’. And ‘[t]hus Robinson and Gallagher differ radically from those historians who emphasize designs for economic exploitation’. Louis (ed.), Imperialism, 6, 8. My response would be that much was lost by not paying attention to these aspects of British imperialism.

This is not to deny that Robinson and Gallagher often made illuminating remarks about individuals and ideas – they frequently did, in passing; it is merely to assert that they seldom developed these themes and did little to stimulate such interests among their followers.

Seal, ‘Preface’, in Gallagher, The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire, ix.

For a thought-provoking new statement of the importance of the dominions, see Hopkins, ‘Rethinking Decolonisation’. 

Robinson and Gallagher, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, 15; Robinson and Gallagher, ‘The Partition of Africa’, 593.

The theory, first essayed in ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, was most fully outlined by Robinson himself in ‘Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism’.

The inadequacy of Robinson's characterisation of ‘the lone London missionary to the Tswana tribes’ illustrating the mechanism of collaboration at its weakest will be apparent to anyone who has read, for example, the work of Jean and John Comaroff. ‘At the other extreme’, Robinson's characterisation of white colonist ‘with the power of an industrial economy behind him’, as ‘the ideal prefabricated collaborator’, is equally deficient. See ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, 124. By contrast, Gallagher's solo work on local politics in India is far more detailed and subtle.

Stockwell, ed. British Empire, 165. Ballantyne on ‘Colonial Knowledge’ and Jon E. Wilson on ‘Agency, Narrative and Resistance’ (both in this excellent collection) also suggest the way in which the new imperial history has diverged from the Robinson and Gallagher paradigm. But the more general impression given is that Robinson and Gallagher segue easily into the new literature.

Seeley, Expansion of England (1883), 48–50. Notwithstanding the ‘slippage’ in Victorian notions of race identified by Bell, Idea of Greater Britain, 115.

Dilke, Problems of Greater Britain, 465–66. In his Greater Britain, South Africa was not included in the itinerary of ‘English-speaking’ or ‘English-governed lands’ visited by Dilke. Bell, in ‘From Ancient to Modern in Victorian Imperial Thought’, excludes South Africa from the settler colonies comprising Greater Britain.

Robinson and Gallagher, ‘Partition of Africa’, 70; Africa and the Victorians, 461. This claim has been much contested in South African scholarship, particularly by scholars such as Marks and Trapido and Denoon who have argued that British imperial supremacy in the subcontinent was animated by economic interests. My point is that Robinson and Gallagher are reiterating a longer view of South African exceptionalism.

Pocock, ‘New British History in Atlantic Perspective’, 499–500.

Froude, Oceana, 1, 14–15; Burrow, Liberal Descent, 285; Bell, Idea of Greater Britain.

Seeley, The Expansion of England (1900), 50.

Quoted in Dunn, James Anthony Froude, 414.

‘English Policy in South Africa’ (unsigned but undoubtedly by Froude), 109. See also ‘The South African Problem’.

Lewsen, Selections from the Correspondence of J. X. Merriman, 16; Lewsen, John X. Merriman, 56, 57.

Dunn, James Anthony Froude, 441. See also Goodfellow, Great Britain and South African Confederation, 92.

Burrow, Liberal Descent, 233, 236–37. Burrow is here thinking of America but the point might be extended to colonies on the other side of the Atlantic.

Solomon, Saul Solomon, 193.

Thornton, Imperial Idea and its Enemies, 25.

Trollope, South Africa, 259.

Ibid., 454–55

Ibid., 39, 455.

Ibid., 67, 74–75, 460–61.

Froude, Oceana, 67, 59–60, 70, 82, 83, 228.

Milner to Parkin, 28 April, 1897, in Headlam (ed.), Milner Papers, 42; Thornton, Imperial Idea and its Enemies. 79.

Milner to Grey, 7 Aug. 1899, Milner Papers, 476.

Verschoyle, Cecil Rhodes, xxxi. See also Benyon, Proconsul and Paramountcy, 212ff.; Schreuder and Butler, eds. Sir Graham Bower's Secret History, ‘Editor's Introduction’ and ch. 2.

Dilke, Problems of Greater Britain, 478, 504.

Robinson and Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians, 231.

Keppel-Jones, Rhodes and Rhodesia, 122.

Dilke, Problems of Greater Britain, 482.

Desmond and Moore, Darwin, 184.

See e.g. Sturgis, ‘Anglicisation at the Cape of Good Hope’; Denoon, Grand Illusion.

South African Commercial Advertiser, 17 March 1824.

Standard and Mail, 24 Sept. 1872 (editorial).

Drus, ‘The Political Career of Saul Solomon’, 11.

HMSO, Second Report from the Select Committee on British South Africa, questions 4134, 4175; Walker, W. P. Schreiner, 93, 112.

McCracken, ‘Irish Settlement and Identity in South Africa’, 139, 148. McCracken argues that the identifiably Irish proportion of the white population in 1891 was only 10 per cent of all people of British origin. There were, however, a disproportionate number of Irishmen in prominent positions – as many as a third of Cape governors were Irish – and there were a sizeable number of prominent Irish merchants, politicians and journalists.

My thanks to Donal Lowry for this point.

For the fullest exposition of this theme, see Mackenzie The Scots in South Africa.

Hyslop, ‘Cape Town Highlanders’.

Giliomee, Afrikaners, ch.7

De Villiers, ‘Future Language of South Africa’.

Bickford-Smith, ‘Revisiting Anglicisation in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony’, 85.

See e.g. Walshe, Rise of African Nationalism; Bonner, ‘Transvaal Native Congress 1917–1920’; Willan, ‘An African in Kimberley’; Meli, South Africa Belongs to Us, 44–47, 72–73; Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa, ch. 1.

Saunders, ‘African Attitudes to Britain and the Empire’, 140.

Take, for example, Simons and Simons, Class and Colour in South Africa, 429, writing of the ANC leadership in 1930: ‘The conservatives and their white liberal advisers never quite understood their society or its power structure. They persisted in believing against all the evidence that liberation would come to them through reasoned argument, appeals to Christian ethics, and moderate, constitutional protest. Because of timidity … or want of confidence in their people, they refused to mobilize them for mass struggle.’

De Kock, ‘Sitting for the Civilization Test’, 402.

Thema, ‘Race Problem’ 214.

Cited in Meli, South Africa Belongs to Us, 47. Cf. Pallo Jordan's Ruth First Memorial Lecture delivered at the University of the Witwatersrand, 28 Aug. 2000, in which he points out Mqhayi's ambivalent attitude towards British power and values. http://marxists.architexturez.net/history/international/comintern/sections/sacp/2000/ruth-first.htm.

Nasson, ‘War of Abraham Esau’, 243, 253–54.

Saunders, ‘African Attitudes to Britain and the Empire’, 145–46. This point is amply explored in Limb's ‘Early ANC leaders and the British World’, 56–82.

Cf. Lonsdale, ‘Ornamental Constitutionalism in Africa’, 90: ‘To many Africans, the imperial monarchy embodied, or ought to have embodied, constitutional remedy, not holy awe. In a crisis, as in South Africa, it was even worth fighting for.’ Sapire, ‘We Felt We Were in a New South Africa’.

Thompson, ‘Languages of Loyalism in Southern Africa’.

Pyrah, Imperial Policy and South Africa, 184.

Mawby, ‘Political Behaviour of the British Population of the Transvaal’, 136, 178, 222, 390.

Feinstein's Economic History of South Africa, 259, reveals that the whites constituted just over 20 per cent of the population in the years 1904–30. Table A1.1 indicates that the white population nearly doubled from 632,000 in 1891 to 1,116,800 in 1904.

Hyslop, ‘Imperial Working Class Makes Itself “White”’.

Belich, Paradise Reforged, 76ff.; Phillips, ‘New Zealanders’.

The concept of ‘Britannic’ identity or nationalism is treated by Darwin in the context of the dominions in ‘Third British Empire?’

Ibid., 72.

Dubow, ‘Colonial Nationalism’, 57, 74.

Dubow, Commonwealth of Knowledge, 162–63.

Hancock, Smuts, 203–04.

Garson, ‘English-Speaking South Africans’, 21. Also Lambert, ‘Unknown People’.

Keppel-Jones, Friends or Foes?

Garson, ‘British Connection’, 21.

The conference was timed to mark the opening of the 1820 Settlers National Monument in Grahamstown.

De Villiers (ed.), English-Speaking South Africa Today, vol. 3, 217.

Lowry, ‘Crown, Empire Loyalism and the Assimilation of Non-British White Subjects’, 99.

Jacobson, ‘Growing up Jewish’, 19–20.

My approach outlined here is somewhat different from that taken by John Lambert who is currently engaged in writing what he intriguingly refers to as a biography of white English-speaking South Africans. It is closer to that taken by Saunders in ‘Britishness in South Africa’.

Thompson, ‘Languages of Loyalism in Southern Africa’.

Dubow, Commonwealth of Knowledge.

Kitty Hauser's review of In Search of H. V. Morton.

Bridge and Federowich, ‘Mapping the British World’.

Porter, Absent Minded Imperialists, vii, 306.

Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 44.

Pocock, ‘British History’, 604–05.

Pocock, Discovery of Islands, 23.

Burnard, ‘British Atlantic World’; Armitage, ‘Greater Britain’, 434.

Bennett, Anglosphere Challenge; Roberts, History of the English-Speaking Peoples; Ferguson, Empire.

Laidlaw, Colonial Connections.