in the framework of the British Empire to benefit from free trade to a greater extent than any other branch of commerce. In 1852, during a brief interlude of Tory rule under Lord Derby, Wilson went to work on a new venture, which he must have partially funded from Economist profits: the following year the Banker’s Gazette section of the paper announced the founding of a Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China, initial capital £1 million, prospects ‘unrivalled’, success ‘beyond doubt’.88 Wilson’s pieces for the Economist on the 1847 financial crisis – published as Capital, Currency and Banking the same year – pointed out, in the wake of so many bank failures, a field for profitable investment in the Far East, and lessons on avoiding a similar fate there. For the official historian of Standard and Chartered Bank, this explains a charter initially restricting its exchange activities. Wilson showed ‘grave caution’, and emphasized that the note issue would be covered by ‘public securities and bullion on the same principle as was observed by the Bank of England’.89 Wilson insisted the bank be pan-Asian and include India, a case he made directly to Gladstone in a letter lobbying for a royal charter over the objections of the East India Company and the Board of Control.90 In the next few years the Chartered Bank expanded rapidly, driven by the growth of trade within Asia, most importantly in Indian opium, for the sake of which Britain would fight a second war with China.
At almost the same moment, Wilson was promoted to high government office in the Peelite-Whig coalition headed by Lord Aberdeen. As Financial Secretary to the Treasury until 1857, he assisted Gladstone in drafting his first budgets. To these landmarks in fiscal minimalism he contributed consolidation of customs duties, reducing or ending levies on soap, tea and apples, and cutting and simplifying all other import rules, a long-standing demand of City merchants whose realization Wilson viewed as a capstone of the free trade movement in England.91 In 1855 Cornewall Lewis succeeded Gladstone as Chancellor, making the Treasury an Economist stronghold. An academician whose delivery was described by a contemporary as ‘enough to dishearten any political assembly … nearly inaudible, monotonous, halting’, which yet ‘covered very powerful resources of argument, humour and illustration’,92 he once told his friend: ‘You see, Wilson, you are an animal, I am only a vegetable.’93 The self-deprecation was not to be taken seriously: Wilson held him in high regard, and with Lewis’s help was about to stamp his ideas on the map of the world.
Now ensconced at the pinnacle of the state, Wilson was in a position to survey the empire it had acquired, and was continuing to expand. A series of wars to defend and augment its borders, secure bases, trading rights and routes, and check the progress of rivals, coincided with his new vantage point. British imperial power started to become central to the liberal worldview of the Economist in ways it had not been before. In the 1840s the paper had viewed even white settler colonies like Canada either as burdens that cost more to defend than they were worth, or as simple outlets for trade and investment, over which it was unnecessary to exert direct control. (In this spirit, it once wanted to dismiss the entire diplomatic corps and replace it with merchants, who ‘may feel petty slights in intercourse with foreigners’ but never got so worked up as to risk their lives, while ‘inflated representatives excite strife and bloodshed on account of dignity’.)94 This was a position that could draw on Adam Smith and the Physiocrats, for whom colonies were among the most misguided and pernicious forms of protection. To their anti-mercantilist agenda, the Economist of these years added its theory of natural harmony, according to which free trade meant peace and goodwill not just at home between classes, but among the nations of the world as well.
Once Wilson was in government, however, the Economist revised this earlier vision of laissez-faire. Where imperial interests were at stake, war could become an absolute necessity, to be embraced. This conversion split the free traders of the 1840s, escalating into an epic confrontation with the most profound consequences for the Economist and the liberalism it embodied, which played out over a run of interconnected imperial conflicts from 1853 to 1860. Wars against Russia and China, and conflicts in India, rocked British liberalism at home and recast it abroad. Since then, the Economist has rarely wavered from the view that laissez-faire may best be furthered through the barrel of a gun.
Crimean Turning Point: Liberals Fall Out
Though little remembered today, the Crimean War was by far the largest armed conflict in the century between 1815 and 1914, involving pitched battles between the major powers in Russia and the Balkans, and naval clashes from the Black Sea to the Baltic and the Arctic to the Pacific. The war was ostensibly triggered by religious quarrels in Ottoman-controlled Palestine, and at stake was the fate of the Ottoman Empire itself – a large part of which still stood in south-eastern Europe – and which of the rival predators would dominate or dismember it: Russia in the East, or Britain and France in the West. War fever took hold of the British press late in 1853, when news reached London of the destruction of the Ottoman fleet at Sinope on the Black Sea, after a surprise naval bombardment by Russia. The Economist, however, had been clamouring for an armed solution to the ‘Eastern Question’ – i.e. war with Russia – a year prior to the ‘disgraceful and melancholy butchery’ at Sinope: before, that is, much of the press – from the Westminster Review and the Spectator to the Times – took up the same cry.
Its editorialists dismissed the religious dimension of the question: disputes between the Russian Orthodox, French Catholic and Protestant Churches over control of holy places in Jerusalem and Bethlehem were an excuse for their respective nations ‘to peck at the unfortunate carcass of the Porte’. The issue lay elsewhere. If Britain failed to intervene to prop up the Ottomans against the Russians, its own empire in the Near East was in danger:
Russia will have command of Constantinople and the Dardanelles … she will be closer to the Levant than ourselves … her command over the Ottoman Court might at any time induce it to close off the Isthmus of Suez to us, or oblige us to engage in war to prevent such a catastrophe. It is perfectly obvious that our interest imperatively require either that Egypt shall be in our own hands, or in those of a naturally friendly and really independent power.95
In building its case for war the Economist blazoned its break with those who held that free trade automatically meant peace, or counselled the ‘hideous and shallow doctrine’ of non-interference in foreign affairs, even in the face of ‘barbarous sovereigns oppressing their subjects, or powerful states bullying and partitioning their weaker neighbours’. Ethical and commercial justifications for war with Russia were one. ‘Turkish independence’, ‘territorial integrity’, ‘justice, honour and national existence’ appeared side by side with warnings to British businessmen of the consequences of letting Tsar Nicolas take Constantinople.
That anyone who values India and is prepared to maintain and defend it, who regards England as a great empire and not as a little workshop, and who knows how much even of our safety depends upon our naval and especially our Mediterranean supremacy, should profess willingness to permit Russia to plant herself on the Bosporus and the Aegean, and regard it as a matter of indifference whether the key of our Eastern communication be held by a harmless friend or by a formidable rival – this, we confess, passes our powers of comprehension.96
The sooner war broke out the better, for a ‘precarious and ill-conceived peace is almost as fatal and discouraging to commerce as actual hostilities’.97
By the turn of 1854 Palmerston and his war party in parliament and the press had pushed a cautious cabinet headed by Aberdeen into striking an ambitious blow against Russia, with a scheme to shore up British interests in the Near East by offering swathes of the Baltic to Prussia, of the Balkans to Austria, and of the Caucasus to Turkey. Britain and France fought as allies, each loath to see the other benefit by the outcome, Britain eyeing with particular suspicion France’s competing claims in the Levant. The elderly British commander, Lord Raglan, who had lost his right arm at Waterloo, sometimes confused the French and Russians.98 From beginning to end the joint expedition was a disaster. French and British soldiers arrived in the pestilential Danube Delta in summer, and were sent on to the Crimea without maps, proper kit, food or medicine; they froze at the onset of winter. The battles of the Alma and Balaclava were beset by tactical