could be difficult, demanding, costly, and confrontational with natives. But he opposed the idea of cutting them loose. ‘We are pre-eminently a colonizing people. We are, beyond all comparison, the most enterprising, the most successful, and in most respects the best, colonists on the face of the earth.’140 He countenanced force wherever that valiant spirit was obstructed by recalcitrant subjects, or non-Westerners, though in such cases he preferred it to be moderate, and directed from London.
Closest to home, he backed Gladstone’s efforts to ‘pacify Ireland’ after 1868: disestablishing the Church of Ireland – Protestant, in a country four-fifths Catholic – and passing very limited tenure reform to give evicted farmers compensation for their improvements to the land. Any step outside the 1801 Act of Union, however, was anathema. The Economist attacked both the Fenian Brotherhood, made up of armed republicans in America and Ireland, as well as the Home Rule League, which sought greater autonomy through conventional parliamentary forms. Gladstone was right to ‘tread out the Fenian folly’ following an uprising in 1867, which proved that the organization preferred sowing strife to practical politics. But since Home Rule was a ‘gigantic and impossible constitutional revolution’, it was hardly less of a folly. A parliament for Ireland would tear down the entire edifice of the British state, creating a federal instead of imperial parliament in London, unable to override the Irish one ‘without provoking something like a rebellion on every separate occasion’. Home Rulers would ‘be imprudent, but they would be far more logical, if they were to raise a cry at once for an independent Irish Republic’.141 The one consolation for the defeat of the Liberals in 1874 that so shocked Bagehot was, ‘at least it delivers us from the rule of the faction which is anti-English in essence, and which wishes to destroy the Empire’.142 His idea for political reform in Ireland was to suppress the office of viceroy: concentrating the symbolic majesty of the British state in such a person lent credence to the claim of Irish nationalists to live in a subjugated colony – as if Dublin were no different than Delhi.143
Perhaps the most far-reaching colonial crisis during the period was not in Ireland, but in the West Indian colony of Jamaica. Here, in 1865, Governor Edward John Eyre responded to an uprising of former slaves in Morant Bay with brutal force, declaring martial law and deploying troops, who burned and looted over a thousand homes, and killed several hundred black Jamaicans, including a mixed-race member of the Jamaica Assembly. This looked like an organized lynching designed to shore up the power of white sugar planters, whose fortunes had declined since the advent of free labour, free trade and lower-cost sugar a generation earlier – and these events caused massive controversy when news of them reached Britain. Though Bagehot rebuked black rebels as ‘negro Fenians’, he was much more critical of Governor Eyre. For a time he made common cause with John Stuart Mill, who in 1866 set up the Jamaica Committee to press for Eyre to be put on trial; a host of liberals joined Mill, including John Bright, Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer and many others. Opposite them stood Thomas Carlyle and the members of the Governor Eyre Defence and Aid Committee. Bagehot attacked Carlyle in the Economist for defending Eyre’s ‘carnival’ of violence as ‘the worship of brute force’, and a threat to law, justice and liberty – not just in Jamaica, but in England. ‘On Mr. Carlyle’s principles of judging human actions, as exemplified in this Eyre case, Philip II and Alva have a right to the honour and thanks of posterity.’144 But as might be expected, his objection was not primarily moral. Bagehot agreed that blacks were inferior to whites, and acknowledged the importance of maintaining order in the Empire. To assure this in keeping with the needs of capital, however, required some cooperation from subject peoples. The Economist pointed to the tantalizing investments to be made in China’s railways, canals, tea planting, silk growing, and steam navigation, ‘beyond any experience we have yet acquired’, and similar opportunities in ‘Japan, Indochina, Persia, Asiatic Turkey’ and Africa, ‘from Abyssinia to the Cape’. To unlock these treasures, one point had be kept in mind – ‘that very large bodies of dark laborers will work willingly under a very few European supervisors’.145
As it turned out, gaining access to these markets involved more than investment prospectuses. It required armed compulsion, especially in East Asia. Bagehot saw British and French interventions in China to prop up the tottering Qing dynasty against Taiping rebels – a radical millenarian rebellion that spread from rural Guangxi to convulse the country, in part due to prior Western wars to force it open – as a regrettable necessity; but with Englishmen ‘leading the fleets and armies, and administering the finances of the Celestial Empire’, soon to be ‘Governors and Viceroys over vast provinces’, its violent repression had a silver lining. Farther east in Japan, trade – and the sort of extra-territorial legal treatment that British merchants should expect – was also at stake, in a nation that had shown still stronger distrust of Westerners than China. The Economist was unsure if the Royal Navy had legitimate grounds to bombard Kagoshima in 1863, to punish the ‘Daimio Satsuma’ for the death of a British merchant. But once begun, the paper pushed for widening the war. ‘Possibly we may have to bombard the Spiritual Emperor as well as the Feudal Baron, if his palace lie within a mile or two of the shore. Anyhow we are in for it: we must now hold our ground and make good our position; and we must do this by force and at the cost of blood.’146 As the smoke settled afterwards, it worried that in continuously shelling a town of 150,000 (‘as large as Sheffield’) for over forty-eight hours ‘we do seem to have outstepped all the now recognized boundaries of civilized and credible warfare’. Satsuma’s representatives later put the death toll at 1,500.147
Not all imperial undertakings were military during these years. Bagehot grumbled in 1875 when Disraeli, as prime minister, opted to buy 176,602 shares in the Suez Canal from the Khedive of Egypt, bringing the total Britain owned to just under half. As an investment yielding 5 per cent it was sound, and would allow the Khedive to ‘reform his finances’. But Bagehot was unsure if it would solve the problem it was meant to address – making sure the passage to India stayed open, and in British hands. ‘We do not know what will be the course of history or the necessities of future times.’ ‘If we are prepared to take hold of Egypt, will this share in the Suez Canal help us in so doing? Will it not be better to take the country when necessary, without making public beforehand our intention to do so?’148 India itself was non-negotiable, whatever route was taken there, as Bagehot affirmed in 1863 at the death of Elgin – the man sent east to break Chinese resistance in the Second Opium War and open Japan, subsequently appointed viceroy of India. His successor, Sir John Lawrence, had the ‘single quality’ needed to ‘keep a vast population which wants to recede, perpetually advancing’. What was that? ‘Force’.149
Perhaps the most revealing example of the open-ended imperialism of the Economist under Bagehot was its enthusiasm for the least successful of all such ventures: the invasion of Mexico at the end of 1861 by France, with support from Spain and Britain. It applauded Napoleon III for rebuilding a failed state unable to pay its creditors in Europe, and for balancing the US, with its back turned fighting the Civil War. The installation of an Austrian archduke, Maximilian, on Mexico’s throne three years later, was a particular stroke of brilliance – a better administrator than ‘any obtainable half-caste or Indian president’, whose rule would ensure the export of everything from silver to apples, and timely interest payments on Mexico’s sovereign debt.150 Three years later Maximilian was executed by firing squad in Querétaro, after French forces hastily withdrew.
In Physics and Politics, Bagehot explained his approach to empire in more theoretical terms, as a complement to these snapshots in the Economist. Applying his take on positivism and the natural sciences to human societies around the world, he divided them into three evolutionary epochs: a ‘preliminary age’, primitive, tribal and customary; a ‘fighting age’, in which some nations prevailed over others thanks to their martial qualities; and a third, progressive, industrial and peaceful ‘age of discussion’, where the ‘higher gifts and graces have rapid progress’. This, of course, was Victorian Britain: the class rule of the ten thousand educated members of society that Bagehot had outlined in the English Constitution found an evolutionary basis in ‘adaptation’ and ‘natural selection’. Bagehot added that some law of imitation must operate inside nations to account for their success in the world – a copying process, working