Pax Britannica: from empire to peace
The publication in 1776 of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as Britain’s first overseas empire was unravelling, was to cast a long shadow over Britain’s subsequent expansionary activities as both point of comparison and cautionary tale.
The centenary of Gibbon’s death in 1894, followed closely by the 1899-1902 South African War, elicited a wave of soul-searching about the British Empire. One of the most significant cautionary tales of the period was an anonymous pamphlet, first published in 1900 and reprinted in 1905, which was penned by Elliot Evans Mills.5 It was a futuristic account destined for ‘the national schools of Japan’ and supposedly written in Tokyo in 2005, ten years after the alleged collapse of the British Empire. In the preface to the book, Mills wrote: ‘I have found those phrases in which he [Gibbon] described the decadence of Rome singularly applicable to the England of the Twentieth Century.’6 Had the British paid more attention to Gibbon, he writes, their empire would not have collapsed. Inciting the young readers of his pamphlet to be alert to the pitfalls of empire, Mills as anonymous author declares, ‘Let us study the Decline and Fall of England, as the English should have studied the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.’7 If this fictional account was an indication of British anxieties about its empire, the remedies that would prevent or at least postpone such a loss were also to be found in Gibbon. Guarding against the loss of civic virtue, which was one of the harbingers of Rome’s decline, according to Gibbon, and ensuring a just peace and good order, were considered by British scholars and politicians to be the hallmarks of their imperialism in their second overseas empire—hallmarks that distinguished it from other empires.That British imperial identity was linked to (or perceived to be linked to) the concepts of peace and order is evident in the number of books that bear the title Pax Britannica, whether they were written during or after the demise of the British Empire and whether or not they were critical of its practices and ideologies.8 In 1913, H.R.
Perris, former secretary of the British Peace Council, pointed to the growth of the ‘peace sentiment’ in public opinion, describing it as evidence of the progress of civilisation. If in hindsight such an opinion, expressed on the eve of one of the worst wars in history, appears to be somewhat naive, it nonetheless underlines the firm conviction held by most British officials and scholars at the time that ‘The history of our civilisation, in the light of this new conviction, appears as a steady enlargement of the areas within which law and order reign supreme.'9 The similarity to Rome lies in the mastery of a sea on the road to expansion: for Rome, it was the Mediterranean; for Britain, the Atlantic.10 ‘The prowess of Britain upon the seas... has been an achievement significant for civilisation and peace, as well as famed in the annals of war.’11 But Perris cautions not to fall short of what he considers the enlightened judgement of the present. Roman invaders, he reminds his readers, had in their time been seen ‘To spoil, to butcher and to commit every kind of violence, [which] they style by a lying name, Government; and when they have spread a general desolation, they call it Peace.’12 Heralding the imminent advent of international law to protect the seas, Perris demarcates British imperialism from the martial Roman version, stating:we shall remember with pride that British ships have carried the torch of law and liberty across the seas to the uttermost corners of the earth, not without occasional faults of arrogance and greed, but, on the whole for the revealing of the world's distant and hidden treasures, the discovery of her resources, the widening of human intercourse, the levelling up of culture, the overthrow of tyranny and savagery, and the spread of liberty, toleration, and justice. If this, as we believe, should prove to be the verdict of history, the Pax Britannica will have given a noble chapter to the annals of human development.13
National pride and imperial justification apart, the aspect of this rather long quotation that is worth noting is Perris' emphasis on Britain's economic activities.
If Britain bestows law, toleration and justice on its colonial territories, it has also opened up economic opportunities to humankind.In this and in other regards, it was inevitably Britain's longest-standing nineteenthcentury colony, India, that was the privileged site of comparison between the imperial oeuvres of Britain and Rome. The same year in which Perris’ work appeared, Viscount James Bryce (1838—1922), historian, Liberal politician, Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford and one-time Ambassador to the United States (1907—1913), published a volume of two historical studies in which he compared the Roman Empire to that of the British in India and the diffusion of Roman and English law across the globe. Bryce’s intention was to compare the two empires as ‘conquering and ruling powers, acquiring and administering dominions outside the original dwelling place of their peoples, and impressing upon these dominions their own type of civilisation’.14 Rome had been the principal agent of the spread of civilisation in the ancient world, whereas England was that of the present period. ‘England has sent her language, her commerce, her laws and institutions forth from herself over an even wider and more populous area than that whose races were moulded in new forms by the laws and institutions of Rome.’15 Of all Britain’s colonies, only India, he argued, was sufficiently like the dominion of Rome to be able to draw true parallels. Like Rome, which had not started out with the notion of conquering Italy, much less the Mediterranean world, England too had no intention of conquering India but was led into the acquisition of territory by events on the spot, in particular rivalry with the French and pressure from the East India Company shareholders. It was not too fanciful an analogy, Bryce wrote, to see
the policy of the English in the days of Clive when they were drawn further and further into Indian conflicts... [paralleling] the policy of the Romans when they entered Sicily to prevent Carthage from establishing her control over it.
In both cases an effort which was advocated as self-protective led to a long series of wars and annexations.16In other words, as Sir John Seeley (1834-1895) was to put it in 1883, in a subsequently much quoted phrase, ‘We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.’17
The sentiments of ‘absent-minded expansion’ were not so much an indication of British short-sightedness about their methods of expansion as a belief that economics and the imposition of institutional order, in the form of British law and administration, were the guiding motors of their imperial project. The strategic lines that linked the Roman Empire had been its roads, whereas for the British it was their railroads, which had been constructed in all the corners of its empire. These strategic lines encouraged and enhanced communications, commerce, trade and the spread of imperial ideas. But the real success of the British, like that of Roman administration, had been to secure peace and good order.18 Commerce and trade could thus proceed unhindered. Bryce acknowledged that the government in India, like that of Rome in her provinces, was despotic. ‘There was under Rome, and there is in British India, no room for popular initiative, or for popular interference with the acts of the rulers... This was, and is, by the nature of the case, inevitable.’19 Like the Romans the British ‘employed the natives in subordinate posts’ only. What set the Roman and British empires apart from all the other empires, past and present, however, was the fact they ‘Both triumphed by force of character.’20 And force of character was, after all, one of the most vaunted traits of British identity during the Victorian and Edwardian eras. The British character abroad, furthermore, was expressed through the imposition of British law. Like Rome, Britain had built a legal system which was not only enduring but was also in use over vast areas of their world.21
Bryce was not the only public figure to draw parallels between Rome and India.
Sir John Robert Seeley, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, had made many of the same points as Bryce thirty years earlier in The Expansion of England; Two Courses of Lectures (1883). Unlike Bryce, however, Seeley traced British expansionary activity leading up to India and inclined to introducing a cautionary tone to his comparisons. He did, however, see Britain’s role, like that of Rome, as one of spreading the light of its civilisation, albeit not with altogether the same success:Among Gauls and Iberians Rome stood as a beacon-light; they acknowledged its brightness, and felt grateful for the illumination they received from it. The dominion of England in India is rather the empire of the modern world over the medieval. The light we bring is not less real, but it is probably less attractive and received with less gratitude. It is not a glorious light shining in darkness, but a somewhat cold daylight introduced in the midst of a warm gorgeous twilight.22
Up until the First World War, comparisons to Rome, however cautionary the tone, were inclined to focus on their respective imperial performances and the similarities or differences between their governance and institutions. After the war, however, the emphasis shifted to the concept of peace. Bo Gabriel de Montgomery, for example, writing in the late 1920s, stated: ‘Pax Britannica, which has given peace and security to the Empire, is being extended gradually beyond the borders of the Commonwealth through treaties and conventions and through the medium of the League of Nations.’23 Although Montgomery’s work was largely about the British Empire and its international outreach, there was only one mention of the Roman Empire and then it was in reference to Italy as the bearer of the Roman tradition.24 By the interwar period, British politicians and authors were hopeful enough about Britain’s imperial role not to have to buttress its activities with reference to Rome.
The journalist and author Frederick A. Voigt followed in this vein in the post-Second World War period. Voigt, who wrote for the Manchester Guardian and was of German descent, had been outraged by Germany’s belligerence during the twentieth century and was particularly concerned with keeping any form of despotism and tyranny at bay. His 1949 Pax Britannica is an attempt to explicate the developing conflict between the U.S.S.R. and the Western powers and to underline the necessity of adhering to the principles of British policy, the Pax Britannica of the title, as a bulwark against the Soviet domination of Europe. The Germans, he opined, had twice destroyed the Pax Europaa proving that a Pax Germanica was incompatible with Pax Europaa.2 Britain, on the other hand, was better equipped to fill this role. ‘Because England is not in Europe, but of Europe’, he wrote, ‘she could not dominate Europe even if she wishes... Ultimately, the Pax Europaa and the Pax Britannica are one.’26
In the aftermath of decolonisation, scholars used Pax Britannica either literally to label British foreign policy peace initiatives or projects, as in Andras Ban’s edited collection of British wartime documents, or as a synonym for the British Empire.27 Although in the latter case its use could be ironic, the choice of the term was nonetheless an indication that whatever the political agenda of the author, there was an acknowledgment, conscious or not, that the breadth and influence of the British Empire was in many ways akin to that of classical Rome.