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The contrast between India and the world of settler self-government could not have been greater. In India, British officials appointed from home exercised executive power, unrestrained (before 1909) by any real element of representative government. The right to local self-rule, successfully claimed by settler societies, was explicitly denied. Instead, the so-called ‘Civilians’ of the Indian Civil Service formed an administrative oligarchy.
Japan was now the third largest naval power – a thought that caused shudders in Canberra and Wellington. But the idea that Japan would risk a conflict with the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ powers was dismissed by Winston Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, as a transparent ruse by ship-hungry British admirals. ‘Why should there be a war with Japan?’ he asked in December 1924. ‘I do not believe there is the slightest chance of it in my lifetime.’
In the desperate circumstances of 1942, the British had promised independence at the end of the war. They jailed thousands of activists to crush the ‘Quit India’ uprising in August 1942. But they lost control of India’s politics and lacked both the strength and the will to reassert their authority at the coming of peace.
Closely watched at Canton, the Company dared not sell opium under the nose of the Chinese authorities. But it could sell it in India to the country traders who would ship it to China and arrange for its sale. A great commercial operation now cranked into action.
The disparity in firepower was often overwhelming, producing a staggering disproportion in casualties. At Omdurman in September 1898, Kitchener’s mixed force of British and Egyptians lost forty-eight killed: his Mahdist opponents at least 10,000.
In their first century of rule (1757–1857), the British in India were not so much an administering as a conquering force and the East India Company a garrison state, organized mainly for war. By the end of that century, they had defeated, annexed or subjugated every significant regional power in the Indian subcontinent.
After 1860 (and well before that in much of the subcontinent), there was no Indian state with the means to ignite political dissidence in a British-ruled district, or to coordinate opposition on a regional scale.
In practice, across a huge swathe of empire, possession was no guarantee that British forms of governance would be introduced or imposed. Whether circumscribed by treaties or the pragmatic desire to avoid too much local resistance, the British accepted the need to keep the apparatus of administration and law much as they found it – although often only after a period of conflict and uncertainty as they muddled their way on to the local political stage.
Between 1836 and 1919, the Moplahs, or Mappilas, impoverished Muslim cultivators in South India, rose on more than thirty occasions to attack their Hindu landlords, usually in revenge for eviction. They were invariably suppressed by military action, mainly for fear that the contagion would spread. Their aim was not to overthrow the rule of the British, but to appeal for its help against their local oppressors.
Armitage claimed to have evidence that Banda and his colleagues had planned the murder of whites, Asians and moderate Africans. Better still, an inquiry would reveal that Banda and his friends were dangerous extremists who could not be allowed to obstruct the Federation’s advance. But it did not turn out like that.
Instead, the inquiry under Sir Patrick Devlin, a high court judge, framed a crushing indictment of the Nyasaland government. It dismissed the ‘murder plot’ as an implausible fiction, denounced the government’s tactics as those of a ‘police state’ (with a horrible echo of Europe’s all too recent travails) and roundly declared that federation was deeply opposed by most Nyasaland Africans.
Britain and France would invade the Canal Zone under the pretext of protecting the waterway from the effects of an Israeli attack upon Egypt which they had secretly urged Israel to launch. Nasser’s crushing defeat would ensure his political downfall – or worse – an outcome to which London, Paris and Tel Aviv (for different reasons) all looked forward with pleasure. Notoriously, this intricate scheme went badly wrong. The Anglo-French operation was aborted within days when Washington, carefully left in the dark, declared its furious opposition. A humiliating withdrawal was to follow. Eden’s health and his premiership collapsed. Nasser became, in the eyes of much of the world, the hero of the hour: a nationalist David who had slain the Goliath of empire.