Serialization of selections from my book Our Country, Then and Now continues with the cooperation of my publisher, Clarity Press.

As stated in the last installment, arguably the most important geopolitical event of the last 500 years has been the rise of the British Empire. This Empire was created through a series of deliberate choices made by the British nation starting with the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603).

So far, we have traced the history of Great Britain through its defeat of the Spanish Empire, its wars with Holland and France, and its epic showdown with France following the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon. With Napoleon’s defeat, Britannia now truly “ruled the waves” and a growing worldwide empire besides.

The 19th Century was the British Empire’s Golden Age, coinciding with the reign of Queen Victoria and the prime ministership of Palmerston. By the end of the century, Britain had solidified its rule over India and its control of trade with China via the Opium Wars.

But on the Continent, a new rival emerged: the German Empire. By the turn of the century, Britain was forming a new Triple Entente with France and Russia to force Germany to fight a two-front war when war inevitably came. But the focal point of the drama had become South Africa with its fabulous gold and diamond wealth. Here the lead actor was Cecil Rhodes.

Britannia Rules the Waves

After 1815, Britain enjoyed decades of unbroken peace, power, and prestige. The Congress of Vienna and the Holy Alliance had firmly restored power in Europe to the traditional monarchies and aristocracies that had been overthrown by Napoleon. In 1838, the crowning of Queen Victoria inaugurated Britain’s modern age. It had monopolies on sea power, sea-borne trade, and manufacturing exports. Britain’s profits from India grew with the export to Europe of tea and gems.

Britain’s conquests now extended to China through the humiliation of that country through the Opium Wars from 1839 to 1860. According to Niall Ferguson, writing in Empire, opium accounted for a staggering forty percent of British exports from India to China. The profits from opium were remitted to London by the East India Company to pay the interest on its enormous debt to wealthy bondholders.[i] Britannia ruled the waves but was ruled in turn by Big Money.

The fabled City of London, legally a private corporation at the heart of the capital, had become the wealthiest square mile in history and may still be. Within the City’s confines, the Baring and Rothschild interests held sway.

[Politically, the leading figure of the age was Lord Palmerston (1784-1865), British prime minister from 1855 to 1858 and from 1859 to 1865, but also Secretary at War or Foreign Secretary most of the rest of the period. Palmerston was truly the architect of the British Empire at its 19^th century zenith, including harboring plans to control the Middle East by settling Europe’s Jews in Palestine. This was well before the appearance of the Zionist movement.]

But once again Russia loomed as a rival in central Asia. Britain countered by allowing France to survive as a major Continental state, with a view to France’s interests in North Africa and the Middle East helping counter the Russian overland advance.

The “Great Game” [a British term], with Afghanistan as the hinge, was underway, followed by Russia’s humiliation by Britain, France, Piedmont-Sardinia, and the Ottoman Turks in the Crimean War, when Russia’s Black Sea port of Sevastopol fell in 1856 after a prolonged siege. Meanwhile, the British navy protected the independence movements against Spain that were taking place in South America.

By the mid-19^th century, Britain stood supreme. The defeat of Napoleon was not only a victory over France but against the international revolutionary impulse. While the revolutionary year of 1848 saw agitation against established governments on the Continent, Britain seemed untouched. Incipient revolts among farmers, workers, and the Irish were easily quashed.

In the US, the victory of the North in the American Civil War may have disappointed British conservatives, but no one was surprised at the growing strength of the industrial colossus across the waves. In fact, a coalescence of US and British interests had already been evident with the Monroe Doctrine and peace on the Canadian border. [The growth of American power had been anticipated by the European states by the late 18^th century. The American Founding Fathers and subsequent statesmen routinely referred to the US as a fledgling “empire.”]

The Rise of Germany

Germany was the newest industrial power, where Chancellor Otto von Bismarck proved adept at playing Britain, France, and Russia off against each other. Prussia, “the wave between two troughs,” rose up to dominate most of what was once the Holy Roman Empire. Bismarck was able to obtain Russia’s acquiescence in Prussia’s war against Austria and its defeat of France in 1870. Wilhelm I was crowned Emperor of Germany at Versailles in France, and the German Empire was born.

The rise of Germany coincided with a new race for colonies in Africa. This was enabled by industrialization and saw the opening of the diamond and gold mines by Britain in South Africa and the invention of the Maxim gun. This early machine gun allowed European forces to obliterate any native opposition to their imperialistic advances. By the time of the Berlin Conference of 1884, almost the entire African continent had been gobbled up by Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Portugal, and Spain. The only independent African state was Ethiopia.

Germany held three large colonies: German East Africa (Tanzania), German Southwest Africa (Namibia), and Kamerun (Cameroon). Germany also began to cultivate its relations with the Ottoman Turks, supporting the modernization of Turkey with loans and technical expertise and laying plans for construction of a Berlin to Bagdad railroad, which conceivably could outflank the British in their sea route to India through the newly built Suez Canal. The German presence could also threaten British designs on Middle Eastern oil.

Bismarck was able to “establish the new Germany as a Continental power state par excellence.”[ii] Through his Kulturkampf, Bismarck abolished the Socialist Party, while German industry became bent on the acquisition of power, which it accomplished by building a military machine on the old Prussian base. Bismarck was a realist in his drive to make Germany a modern economic state through authoritarian methods. Bismarck was forced from office in 1890, leaving Kaiser Wilhelm II in the hands of younger and vainer men and less inclined to compromise in Germany’s search for a role in world power.

But money was a problem. In Germany there was a long tradition of regional governments borrowing through their banking systems to pay for wars and infrastructure. Selling bonds to the rich was a way to extract their money, but at a price—the loans had to be repaid with interest. The alternative was to expand exports and extract wealth from the new colonies. But doing these things meant building ships, also costly. And then, new merchant ships would have to be defended by new warships. And building warships would place Germany in direct competition with Britain. So the groundwork was laid for a new general European war by the last decade of the 19^th century. Meanwhile, industry was developing at breakneck speed, with revolutions starting to take place in communications, transportation, and military firepower.

These changes transcended national boundaries and mitigated divisions among nations, causing many to think that maybe a really big war was not such a great idea. But habits die hard. The nations of Europe had been fighting each other “forever.” Hatreds lay close to the surface, and it was not difficult for rabid national presses and the growing mass media to stir them up.

Something else was new: the US was now a player on the international chessboard. With acquisition of the Philippines, it had extended its reach to Asia and had built a semi-respectable fleet. Its young men had shown in their Civil War that they could kill, a fact that deeply impressed Winston Churchill.

Great Britain was alarmed at the lightning-fast pace of Germany’s advance. Its massive economic growth had allowed it to create an army that dwarfed Britain’s. Germany as a naval power was catching up. So Britain now reached a rapprochement with France and an alliance with Russia, after leaning toward the Japanese against Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. In 1904, Britain, France, and Russia joined in the Triple Entente. Dehio writes, Great Britain “rebuilt on a world-wide scale the grand coalition of earlier centuries against the dominant power on the old Continent.”[iii] This power was no longer Spain or France. It was Germany.

With regard to France and Russia, neither posed a threat to Britain any longer. But the shifting alliances had to be explained to the public. After all, Britain was a “democracy.” So the British press began cranking up its propaganda machine to demonize the new ogres, the monstrous Germans, the “Huns.” Of course, it was embarrassing insofar as the roots of the British royal house were German. But by 1917, the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha had been renamed the House of Windsor, the name deriving from a castle in the London suburbs dating from the time of William the Conqueror.

Only the US was unaccounted for in Britain’s planning. But with the accession of Theodore Roosevelt to the White House after President McKinley was assassinated in 1901, Britain had a friend it could count on. American support, however, did not come for free. Dehio writes: “The price Britain paid for American backing was her attitude of indifference toward construction of the Panama Canal.”[iv] Eventually the price would be much higher: subservience of the pound to the dollar. But not quite yet.

South Africa

There are times and places in history that are so pivotal that the events which transpire reverberate far beyond their origin. So it was with the British colony of South Africa at the end of the 19^th century.

When Europeans began their voyages of discovery, the Portuguese arrived in South Africa first, but the initial settlements were Dutch, starting in 1652. Their purpose was to grow food for Dutch ships traveling to India. Gradually, more Europeans arrived and began to farm the rich soil. They also imported over 70,000 slaves from East Africa and elsewhere.

During the war against Napoleon, the British took over to keep the French from using South Africa as a base to threaten their holdings in India, which was always Britain’s Achilles heel. Britain brought in its own settlers, causing the Dutch to migrate inland, undertaking what was called the Great Trek into the Transvaal. The Dutch themselves were now called Boers, which simply means “farmers.” The British called the area it now controlled the Cape Colony, after the Cape of Good Hope, and paid Holland six million pounds in compensation.

Inland, the Zulu tribe was carrying out a massive ethnic cleansing of the African plains, killing from one to two million other black Africans, thereby weakening resistance to the Europeans. Nearby, the Boers were establishing the South African Republic, lasting from 1852 to 1902, which gained British recognition when they fought against the indigenous Basotho people, resulting in a small area then set aside as Basutoland. A second Boer-dominated republic was the Orange Free State. Total white population of the Boer regions by 1900 was around 400,000.

In 1866, a fifteen-year-old Dutch farm boy named Erasmus Jacobs found a small shiny pebble on the banks of the Orange River on a farm being leased from local natives. The pebble was sold and resold and turned out to be a 21.25-carat diamond. Digging continued and the word spread. By 1873, 900 claims had been registered on land that became the Kimberley diamond mine. The town of Kimberley, named after a British Lord, was established just outside the Orange Free State and in 1877 was annexed by the British and incorporated into the Cape Colony. South Africa was now elevated to worldwide importance.

Coming Next: “Cecil Rhodes,” “Rhodes’s ‘Confession of Faith,’” “Rhodes’s Will”

[i] Ferguson, Empire, p.166.

[ii] Dehio, p.220.

[iii] Ibid, p.235.

[iv] Ibid, p.239.