The nations of the world, claimed Lord Salisbury in a speech to the Primrose League at the Albert Hall in 1898, were divided into the ‘living’ and the ‘dying’. The ‘living’ were the ‘white’ nations – the European powers, America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The ‘dying’ comprised the rest of the world. ‘The living nations’, Salisbury claimed, ‘will gradually encroach on the territory of the dying’ and from this ‘the seeds and causes of conflict among civilized nations will speedily appear’. The partition of the globe ‘may introduce causes of fatal difference between the great nations whose mighty armies stand opposed threatening each other’.
Less than twenty years after Salisbury gave his speech, the mighty armies of the great nations did indeed stand opposed threatening each other, and bringing calamity upon a generation. Virtually from the moment that the ‘lamps went out all over Europe’, in Sir Edward Grey’s evocative phrase, there has been much debate – too much debate – about why they did so and who snuffed them out, not least in this, the centenary year of the First World War.
At the heart of the global imperialist network stood not Germany but Britain. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Britain had become the dominant world power, already with an unmatched empire, a powerhouse of an economy, unparalleled naval power and unsurpassed political influence. Britain’s pre-eminence in all these areas was, however, also being challenged in an unprecedented fashion, by the old powers, such as France, Belgium and Russia, by the new power of the USA, and, most ominously, by the newest power of all in Germany.
The rivalries first manifested themselves outside Europe, as the newer powers tried to create their own empires and Britain sought to maintain its supremacy. There was, in the second half of the nineteenth century, from Africa to the Pacific, a frenzy of land-grabbing. ‘Towards the end of the nineteenth century’, the historian Ronald Hyam observes in his book Britain’s Imperial Century 1815-1914, ‘European politicians felt themselves living in an era of world delimitation, “a partition of the world” as Rosebery called it, from which, as Elgin (when viceroy of India) agreed, Britain could not stand aside because of her “mission as pioneers of civilization”’.
Between 1874 and 1902, Britain alone added 4,750,000 square miles and 90 million people to her Empire, ranging from numerous little Pacific Islands to Baluchistan, from Upper Burma to vast swathes of Africa. Britain, the Times declared, must continue expanding her empire because she could not afford ‘to allow any section even of the Dark Continent to believe that our imperial prestige is on the wane’.
Behind imperialist expansion lay venomous racism. ‘What signify these dark races to us?’, asked Robert Knox, Britain’s leading racial scientist, in his 1850 book The Races of Men. ‘Destined by the nature of their race to run, like all other animals, a certain limited course of existence, it matters little how their extinction is brought about.’ Half a century later, the future American president Theodore Roosevelt wrote in his four-volume tome The Winning of the West that all must appreciate the ‘race importance’ of the struggle between whites and the ‘scattered savage tribes, whose life was but a degrees less meaningless, squalid and ferocious than that of wild beasts’. The elimination of the inferior races would, he insisted, be ‘for the benefit of civilization and in the interests of mankind’, adding that it was ‘idle to apply to savages the rules of international morality that apply between stable and cultured communities’. Here was the grim, genocidal reality of Salisbury’s distinction between ‘living’ and ‘dead’ nations and the true meaning of the ‘encroachment’ of the one upon the other.
If racial ideology justified imperialist expansion and, indeed, genocide, the very fact of empire seemed to confirm the reality of race. ‘What is Empire but the preponderance of race’, as the Liberal imperialist and Prime Minister Lord Roseberry asked. Even the anti-imperialist Gilbert Murray accepted that ‘There is in this world a hierarchy of races’, those that will ‘direct and rule the world’ and the ‘lower breeds of men’ who will have to perform ‘the lower work of the world’. ‘The brown, black and yellow races of the world’, the Times insisted in 1910, ‘had to accept that ‘inequality is inevitable’ because of ‘the facts of race’.
http://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2014/05/15/the-forgotten-roots-of-the-first-world-war/
Posted By F. Sheikh